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More testimonials:
“When there is no wind, rain / tells vertical stories
about the ground,” writes Paul Fisher, and in taut poem
after taut poem he translates those stories, moving vertically
downward through “ghost-riddled strata” and upward
beyond “Christ-old sequoia,” then horizontally to
understand “the calligraphy of mice and voles” and
how, “peck by peck, our ragged / world is drawn.”
His “tempestuous marriage to poetry” offers more than
the usual consolations—it provides celebratory reminders
of habitation, intimacy, and “the raga, the renga, the unceasing
prayer” that deepen our lives toward meaning.
—Michael Waters
author of Darling Vulgarity
Paul Fisher’s poems in Rumors of Shore are set with
both deference and a gentle yearning in the center of the wonder,
mystery and occasionally terrifying randomness and brutality of
the natural world. He generously beckons to us, the readers, to
join him in his experience of nature, his questions, his sweet
hungers: “Like a dew-studded seedling/I wanted to wear the
rings of wisdom/rippling the heart of a redwood tree.”
His is a soft, evocative, welcoming voice, resonant with
a deep humility toward this world: “Sometimes I watch winter
geese/veering back through dreams,//wild wings spread/like shadow-puppet
hands,/....What use is it?..../no answer to my question/put to
sun and moon and rain.”
Paul’s thrifty, precise use of language, and in particular,
metaphor, can astonish us with its unexpected, evocative images
of the living world that expand its meaning, its importance, its
essentialness: “wishful skin,” “warm wine blooming,”
the moon rowing on, the “pirated gimcracks of autumn,”
weeds riddling our walls with roots, “as far as the wind
can snake.” This is a first book to be taken very seriously,
and I am eager to read more.
– Becky Sakellariou
author of The Importance
of Bone
A letter from filmmaker and author Robert Gardner,
regarding an essay on Isabella Gardner:
Dear Paul Fisher:
The only way I can handle the important things in life these days
is to leap at them and try to wrestle sense and meaning from them
without too much pondering.
I immediately printed out your essay on Isabella. After the first
lines, I did not let up reading until the "one sentence biography
of the poet, herself" at the end.
I am still stunned by the clarity, the penetration of your essay
as it unfolds what I am certain are my sister's essential concerns
and intentions as both person and poet. You have revealed more
to me than I knew I knew but never could articulate.
I will not try now to comprehend how you came to such a compelling
understanding using what I take to have been just words. I am
a filmmaker and I cannot 'see' anything without creating an image
and I cannot plumb (plum) anything owing to the surface nature
of my so literal metier. I am both marveling and envious as I
regard what you have done.
What will happen with your essay? Who else will have a chance
to read what I think are important thoughts?
I am sorry to carry on this way but I wanted you to know the extent
to which the last 20 minutes have been transfigured by your work.
Most warmly,
Robert Gardner
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Links to Paul Fisher's work:
Panhala
Poetry archive, July 2010
the Centrifugal Eye: May 2008 Issue.
www.centrifugaleye.com
(archives portal, Vol 3 Issue 2)
Essay,
Interview
& 4
poems.
the Dirty Napkin
Vol 3.2 Spring
2010
Cover Prize & 2 other poems.
Innisfree Poetry Journal. Spring
2010.
Waccamaw Journal, No. 4, Fall 2009
www.waccamawjournal.com
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