FITHIAN PRESS Transformation and Transcendence Through Poetry In my early fantasies I thought if the day comes I dare to climb on the Flying A red horse on the gas station pole at the corner of Fifth and Main, if the day ever comes I take the golden bridle in hand and pass through clouds and stars, the great wings opening and closing as we flap through the universe toward the Chimera that waits in the night to vomit the lead from its jaws, would I be bold to risk such transformation, seize the bright mane though it burn my fingers, though heaven's air is thin and hard to breathe, though planets spin and die around us? --from "Flying Horses" by Jeanne Lohmann The poems in this fourth collection of poetry by Jeanne Lohmann are grouped together loosely by subject matter and divided into four parts. Part One celebrates travel and the risk and love and happenstance that can be a part of it. Part Two deals with loss: what it's like to age and watch loved ones "fall out of my life like seed. We can never be done with each other." The poems here are also about the many things missed when a person is gone--from the ordinary to the remarkable--and the musings and fantasies that continue even after those relationships have ended. Part Three celebrates creativity--in gardening, in children, in the everyday, and especially in poetry. Part Four probes the relationship between the poet and nature and death: an awe and fear of a flood; the inability to return to a much-loved meadow; the first wasp of the season; sleeping outside under the stars. Flying Horses has a sense of a plot or evolution. "The heart grown ready to make the new experiment: to be lifted and stretched by measureless new dimensions," moves on to darker images like that of flapping "through the universe toward the Chimera that waits in the night." What remains like a watermark throughout the book is the wisdom found in the epigraph: we can take nothing for granted. Jeanne Lohmann, whose writing has appeared in literary reviews and anthologies throughout the United States, is a graduate of the creative writing program at San Francisco State University and the author of Gathering a Life (John Daniel & Company, 1989), Between Silence and Answer (Pendle Hill, 1994), and Granite Under Water (Fithian Press, 1996). She lives and writes in Olympia, Washington. Flying Horses Poems by Jeanne Lohmann ISBN 1-56474-351-9 96 pages, paperback, $12.00 For ordering information, click here or phone (800) 662-8351 or order this book now!