James P. Kain

Coming to My Senses James P. Kain

Book Description Coming to My Senses is a collection of old and new poems written over many years in many places. So it is a kind of anthology of my works to date. In putting it together I looked for common elements in order to group the poems, and found five directions that the poems take: Seeking Passage is about moving through changes in life, looking forward or backward and recognizing the need for change. Of Love and Loss is self explanatory - poems responding to the heartache of love and memories gone. Diversions & Reflections are poems of response to the moment, creative outbursts responding to the moment. alludes to the sources of ideas and inspiration, and includes poems exploring the poets' role and identity. Coming to my Senses is about finding my place in the here and now through the poetic experience. It is the summing up of my understanding that poetry is not an escape, a frill or a crutch, but a discovery of a deeper reality through giving attention to the sense of the moment. In The Preface I comment: "Writing poems for me has always been an experiment, an extension of awareness, a searching into the internal life of emotion and thought. It has been a practice in reawakening the language by seeking novel ways to put words together, not just for the game of wordplay, but to refocus the mind by bringing attention to the words themselves and the things they point to - to see them strangely new, to hear them create music through their rhythm and sound. To gently shake the reader awake, to see in front of them an image perhaps from a dream that may not make much sense, but there it is, in wonder and artistry. There is something still marvelous and meaningful in the world even in its uncertain and elusive presence; if this is not the stuff of poetry, I don't know what is. Poetry, for me then, is a search and a celeb