AUTISM by Edward Byrne: September 2010

AUTISM: A POEM

This blog has been created as an open experiment of poetry composition, perhaps a glimpse at an emerging manuscript as it matures. This working manuscript should not be considered as complete or published. Instead, this should be viewed as merely an early stage in the process of creation.

I have placed below some of the pages from an isolated venture in one of my typescript loose-leaf folders. The contents here represent portions of an ongoing personal project with a particularly narrow focus intended to eventually develop toward a book-length poetry sequence with the tentative working title of Autism.

The poem will grow as new sections are added. The individual posts are designed so that they may be viewed as independent items; however, I have consciously carried themes, images, and similar language through the extended sequence with the hope that connectivity and continuity will be preserved among numerous sections of the long poem.

Readers are asked to regard this piece as a work in progress, a partial or rough draft rather than a finished product (even if some selected segments previously may have appeared in print), and I request everyone realize various edits, emendations, or expansion may be made to the posts at any time in the future. Moreover, at some point the entire sequence will be removed to undergo a complete revision.

Therefore, I urge visitors to become followers of the blog by clicking the link in the sidebar, as well as to follow on Twitter for updates. Readers are also invited to browse my personal web site for additional information.

Indeed, a significant part of this experiment involves a certain amount of transparency that includes the possibility for readers to communicate responses and offer constructive suggestions, both of which I welcome through post comments or e-mail messages.

Also, I advise that the order of the numbered sections is not meant to be at all definitive since the long poem’s sequence will certainly be reorganized as the work in this temporary format starts to resemble a completed manuscript and begins to assume a more formal shape that might eventually be suitable for publication. In fact, I welcome interest from book publishers as well.

Thank you for taking the time to examine this trial stage, a test which I perceive as a preliminary process in the composition of a possible poetry manuscript. —Edward Byrne

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

AUTISM: A POEM

. . . . .XXII. Balloon Launch

My wife, my son, and I
. . . . .watch two dozen balloons launched

from the middle of a mud-filled
. . . . .meadow, each one rising like another

colorful sun suddenly added
. . . . .to the wide morning sky, shining

in bright reflection as it drifts
. . . . .into a slant of dawn light, reaches

toward farmland farther east.
. . . . .Every year we come here, hoping

to notice once more how
. . . . .these large objects float so easily

with even the slightest breeze,
. . . . .moving smoothly through the blue

fields above us, now cruising
. . . . .the wind current as quietly as those

final few scraps of clouds
. . . . .forging higher overhead, nothing

more than decorative remnants
. . . . .left over from yesterday’s storm.

Tinted Distances by Edward Byrne (Turning Point Books, 2011) ISBN: 978-1936370337.

The poems of Edward Byrne’s Tinted Distances strongly inhabit the world, even as they meditate on how that world is perceived in art and memory.

"Tinted Distances is the achievement of a wise and discerning poet."
—Claudia Emerson

"(Tinted Distances) is a wonderful book, one that readers will return to again and again."
—Sherod Santos

"Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode."
—Dorianne Laux

Tinted Distances is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's.

Seeded Light by Edward Byrne (Turning Point Books, 2010)

Best Books of Indiana 2011: Finalist. Judges' Citation: "As the title implies, [Seeded Light] includes many poems where nature plays an important part. An emphasis on human relationships intertwines with natural description to give these poems philosophical and emotional depths. Byrne brings to life an old family farm gone fallow, a visit to an inn where the speaker spent his honeymoon, and Lester Young playing tenor sax." —Indiana Center for the Book, Indiana State Library

" ... is memorial and social, scenic and intimate ..."
—David Baker

" ... offers abundant evidence of a mind’s alertness to the world of nature and to modern urban reality ..."
—Alfred Corn

"... as mysterious and elusive as the permutations of light and shadow for which Byrne has such a canny eye ... subtly virtuosic displays of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance ..."
—Frank Wilson
The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Rich, shaded, and subtle in texture, with second lines often bleeding into the next couplet, these open couplets expand meaning, encouraging the reader to follow."
—Zara Raab
Poemeleon

"... there is always light, from the slimmest of glimmers to full moony illumination, and it is that light, seeded throughout, that we will remember, long after we close the pages and turn off the lamp."
—Barbara Crooker
Rattle

"The liveliness of any art, Byrne implicitly and convincingly argues, depends on union of emotion and intellect, design and accident."
—Lesley Wheeler
The Adirondack Review

“These poems take readers on very human journeys through translucent landscapes where the world is in some way in balance, or in touch, with what we are. They especially lend themselves to meditative reading, and their gift is a sense of deepened understanding of and participation in the natural world.”
—Janet McCann
Yanaguana Literary Review

"What makes Byrne's poems memorable is his control of plain language that serves as a guiding light."
—JL Kato
Tipton Poetry Journal