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This collection is born from James McGrath’s decades-long friendship with the Hopi and particularly with his collaborator, the artist Otellie Loloma. Rather than a memoir or narrative detailing external events, these poems are an inner testimony, enacted through rhythmic lyrics that lead us to a mythic place, a world redolent with meaning. These poems, then, are really songs, songs emerging from a primordial source. McGrath holds close to that source, achieving a timeless wholeness, a kind of ritual purification through language. Mimetic of the sacred, McGrath’s poems or songs begin to dance. The page becomes a dancing place, a plaza where gesture, image and sound meld to convey a reality as fresh as it is ancient. James McGrath lives in an old adobe house in the traditional village of La Cieneguilla, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is known for his narrative poetry in the KAET/PBS American Indian Artist Series of the 1970s. James was creative writing instructor and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in the early 1960s and spent twenty years teaching and as Arts and Humanities Coordinator for the Department of Defense Overseas Schools in Europe and the Far East. He was Poet-artist in Residence with the US Information Service, Arts America, in Yemen, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Republic of Congo in the 1990s. His collections of poetry, At the Edgelessness of Light, Speaking with Magpies, Dreaming Invisible Voices, and Valentines and Forgeries are all published by Sunstone Press.
