Beginningless

In Beginningless, the engaging clarity that characterized James Warner's earlier poetry invites us further, through delight, adversity, and interregnum, in view of renewal's wellspring.

Anchoring a section of shorter poems of verve and formal variety, a kaleidoscopic sequence set in New York City riffs on metropolitan life - its disjunctions, and a secret. While in contrast 'Red Mountain Diary', a dozen poems set in South India, evokes winter sojourns in 'a place apart', amidst a deeply-rooted culture in which 'poetry became their inland sea'. 

Later poems circle the mystery of shared meaning, dramatize kinds of aspiration, and adapt a very old use of the saying voice. The long concluding poem, 'On the Fundamental Problem', unfolds a traditional analysis of baseline psychological suffering, its cause and the method of its removal, according to the ancient teachings of Vedanta. Sustained by the immediacy of blank verse, it throws new light on our shared condition.  

Setting out with memorable language, and the encouragement poetry can give us to be honest with ourselves, Beginningless takes a new angle on Irving Layton's seminal injunction, 'Whatever else poetry is freedom.'