book of hours: an illuminated manuscript

photos / poems / healing.

Jay Heins is an accidental poet. Heins’ debut poetry collection, book of hours, gently asks you to consider both small miracles and large tragedies.

Inspired by medieval Christian illuminated manuscripts, Heins adapts a practice of pairing poetry with visual art into a nature-based secular kind of worship. These unconventional prayers are a devotional practice of gratitude juxtaposed with grief, meditations on how death informs life. Consider the lilac bushes taking over the cemetery. The hills / that unzipped green / only yesterday set against the doors of the chemo ward. Heins’ poetry sketches the beauty and pain when time removes the guardrails. Always returning to nature for solace, with a focus on the cyclical, book of hours reminds us that time stops; yet / I am moving / and the river flows.

-:: -

how to cook a poem

take one inconsequential event latch on by imagination add a sequence of images imbue with symbolic meaning marinate in a fugue state winnow the grain build up in layers clarify and distill draw out the essence crystallize a gem, a jewel meta amuse-guele consomme of new experience this inconsequential thing that exists only for its own pleasure

-:: -