Figures of Humor and Strange Beauty explores the permeability of dream and reality, tapping the wellspring of inspiration that arises from meditative engagement with the mysteries of the natural world. These figures posed and given back to the ocean are akin to previous and developing selves–selves attuning to the boundarylessness of outer and inner, listening to what speaks ‘into the silence between sounds.’ The tasting and taking of stones is a communing with moon and sea, recalling the creation myth of swallowing whole, the wild, indecipherable life force. This journey that begins by descending a stairway to the sea, becomes the living poem poet Kath Abela steps into–dark lines on the page as organic as the patterns in sand drawn by waves. This magical collection, ‘Through the white open door to dream’ and ‘crossing the shadows of birds, ’ carries readers aloft to reflective, heavenward realms, plunges us into invigorating, glittering depths.‘

–Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of Four Quarters: an homage to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets