The Illuminations, Poems by Mary Kay Rummel
The Illuminations is a book of poems about both the spirit and the body, how they exist in opposition and together. Ranging across history and sacred texts, Mary Kay Rummel examines "the flesh and the blood and the bread of it," of everything that is both soul and flesh.
Sample Poems by Mary Kay Rummel
"In
the journey of this book, the poet, Mary Kay Rummel, travels to Ireland
to explore her Celtic roots and then continues on to other beautiful places
on 'this millefleured earth.' She leaves behind the Celtic illuminated
books to take in the world with her own 'illumined eye.' She’s 'learning
how to visit,' she says in one poem about Guatemala, and takes notice
of life: spirituality, art, margins, translation, poverty, history, sexuality,
ageing, and love. All these themes come into being through the lens of
a woman’s experience."--Roseann Lloyd
"Mary Kay Rummel, much like some 8th century Irish scribe, perched on a high bench near a window, has not only observed the ever-changing light of the world, she has pressed her ear to the thalo blue lips of Heaven and made her own luminous manuscript, fantastical and full of music."--Jackson Wheeler
"In The Illuminations, Mary Kay Rummel’s poems occupy the zone where danger and beauty coexist. She doesn’t turn away from 'the large, the frightening trapped/ for a moment in the small'. If her method is to traverse dualism--'the lion god on every page/ reviver of cubs, swallower of sinners'--she never takes the easy road to reconciliation or capitulation, the absorption of evil by a transcendent good. No, she leaves us on the edge, in the margins of illuminations where,'all is relationship, everything counts (Cairns).' "--Patricia Barone
Mary Kay Rummel is the author of Green Journey, Red Bird published by Loonfeather Press. Her first poetry book, This Body She’s Entered, was published by New Rivers Press as a Minnesota Voices Award winner and a poetry chapbook, The Long Road Into North was published by Juniper Press. She has had poems published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, most recently in, ArtLife, Nimrod, Northeast, and Water-Stone Review. Other publications include Great River Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Luna, Bloomsbury Review, California Quarterly, Flyway Literary Review, Abraxis and Passages North. She was included in 33 Minnesota Poets published by Nodin Press and was a winner of a Lake Superior Writers Award. In 2004 Andrew Motion, poet Laureate of England, chose a series of her poems to be exhibited at LondonArt. One of her poems was short listed for the 2004 Féile Filíochta International Poetry Competition in Dublin. She has performed her poetry with musicians and dancers. She has received fellowships for residencies at Vermont Studio Center (where many of the poems in this book were written), the Anderson Center and Norcroft. Mary Kay has published three books of nonfiction with Elizabeth Quintero. She is professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, currently teaches at California State University, Channel Islands and divides her time between California and Minnesota.
ISBN: 193345637x, 112 pages, $17.00