Asheville poet focuses on the ‘Now’
As a practitioner and student of poetry all my life, I’ve noticed that while there is a lot of poetry written well and with talented reach, at the same time, there is little current poetry that I’ve experienced that one would classify as being “wise” or “transcendent.”
So, when I received a copy of Asheville resident Steve Abhaya Brooks’ collection “The Poetry of the Moment of Life Itself” (Amazon, 2024, 561 pgs.), I was immediately taken aback (or should I say “taken forward”) by what I held in my hands and was reading.
Author of many volumes of poetry and biographic prose, Brooks spent time in India with enlightened Buddhist teachers in his younger years and has been a practitioner of that spiritual path ever since, and the training and practice shows up strongly in this current work. The book’s title hints at the central theme of the several hundred poems in this book — that of being in the present moment, or in “the Now” as the Buddhists would say. And so reading Brooks’ poems at this moment, I’m struck by the condensed precision and personalized clarity of each one which focuses on the various aspects of our lives and what those aspects could or should be. One could even say that there is something “otherly” in these poems, in the sense that elevated spiritual teachers speak about a universal and mysterious God.
In a format that is a very vertical, single-word line format, Brooks creates a poetry that causes the reader to consider each word and its significance. In this sense, the priority is more on the silence in the poems than the chatter. Each word being its own moment. From literally the first poem “The Buddha Had Dreams,” we get a sense of this “otherness,” this “presence.” “My dream/reminded me/of love, which/reminds me/of Love itself.”
As one might expect from a tome such as this, the subject of “love” is ever-present and all-pervading. It’s just that in Brooks’ vision, love takes many forms and encompasses many instances. This is evident in such lines as “Pulled/into the/outskirts/of my love/you may/see the approaching/headlights/of my/heart.” Or in the poem “Wonder at Love” where he writes: “... I wondered/at meaning,/as if/love/had meaning,/until i was/told i was/love itself./Meaninglessness/ attained its/prominence,/and wisdom/its ubiquity.” Or even to the actual act of writing, Brooks writes of love: “Making/love to this/scrubby lot/of words/brings me/such joy,/i forget/that joy/and love/were there/all along.” And the same holds true when addressing such subjects as “joy”: “Joy itself/has the/power/ to store/awareness/of joy.” Or on the subject of “reality”: “One reality/is subdivided,/the other/unites them/they are/the same.”
But love isn’t the only thing that Brooks writes about. As I mentioned, there is also “wisdom.” In the poem “On Wisdom,” when he writes: “Wisdom is/always true/not what/passes/for truth/in the world/of proposed/truths,/a briar/patch of/conjecture/and belief.” There is also a lot of what one might call “Zen paradox” in these poems. For instance, when he writes “One reality/is subdivided/the other/unites them/they are/the same,” one wonders how can this be true? But he addresses this apparent contradiction in the poem “What Is True” when he writes “Our source/is within us/to be seen,/the bare/force/of love,/the origin/of who/we are,/this love/itself.” But then there are subjects such as “original sin,” which he addresses in a poem of the same name: “The so-called/original sin/came when/human/beings/first thought/of themselves/as separate/from their/source./A simple/error of/holding/what/cannot/be held.” And then there are everyday subjects like parked cars and photography and a trip to the dentist and losing his phone. Yet, all written within the context of a higher spiritual vision.
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I’m finding that I’m enjoying the subtle humor in these poems. Especially the more personal ones — the ones you could call the “I” poems, where the first person pronoun is used with authority, yet with almost abject humility. For instance, toward the end of the book in the poem “The Mind Never Quits,” he writes “Given/the mind/of a plant/i would/choose/asparagus.” And in the poem “I Speak of Joy, “I speak/of joy,/used like/the name/of a soap,” he says. There are so many poems like these and others that stand out in Brooks’ new book. Just paging through the Table of Contents puts one in a mindset of leafing through the Tao Te Ching or the biblical Apocrapha. I knew of Steve Brooks when we were both living in San Francisco in the 1970s. He was a very public poet. Even theatrical. Brooks has put in the time and the focused effort since then and over the course of his lifetime to end up where he is — one of the wisdom-keepers from the 60s generation here in the U.S.
An appropriately telling and fitting conclusion to my review, here, would be to simply quote from Brooks’ statement on the back cover of the book. And I quote: “I realized that Rumi and Kabir were not my teachers, they were my brothers. How do you pass on a formless truth? With poetry. How do you describe innate reality? With poetry. How do you leap from silence to silence? With poetry. How do you leap from stillness into stillness? With poetry.”
(Thomas Crowe is a regular contributor to Smoky Mountain Living — a sister publication to The Smoky Mountain News — and Rapid River and is the author of the award-winning memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods” and is publisher of New Native Press.)
