Beacons, Blues and Holy Goats

If you’ll pardon a bit of self-promotion, I’d like to let you know that my first full-length book of poetry is out.

Here’s a description of its content:

In Beacons, Blues and Holy Goats, Stephen T Berg brings us nose to nose with bicycles, farmers, country lanes, bad roads, and the pacific coast through narrative poems both lyrical and full of longing. He brings us to the hard, rusty places humans find themselves in, then shines a moment of rhythm, language and light on them.

The poems touch on Blake’s notions of innocence and experience, by exploring spiritual belief set against life experience. In “But for an Otter”, he writes, “in that fragrant acrid cloud / by the swaying skirts of eelgrass and choirs of kelp and shell / he waits for some solicitous sand crab to move his beached heart / into a tidal font of hope.”

Here, welders are poets, “the blue arch of a 7018 rod is thought, / that alloy is voice, that metal is diction, / and welding is conviction,” and we note that mushrooms have, “full hips, the botox-smooth brow, the parted fluting breath…of spore and earth.”

Poetry here is language rendered to “swagger,” “surprise,” and “break us open”. 

                    – Yvonne Blomer, past poet laureate of Victoria, BC, and
                        editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and author
                        of As if a Raven.

If you’d like to purchase a copy please go here.