You too have been gifted with a voice
of words shaped around the air;
I am not speaking of that voice,
but the one you have, and are afraid to use.
If you would meditate, then speak;
if you would speak then know that the sound
of your breathing passed through the pure
silence of your body, and all the music that follows
is the freedom that we were born for.
The air is already rushing in to fill you.
What is the beauty that you will sing?
–from “July Leaves”

Overview

Songs from a Wild Place is Jason Kirkey’s second volume of poetry after Portraits of Beauty.  Its motifs range from self-transformation, quiet revelations found in the natural world, love, and the re-imagination of culture and spirit; guiding the reader from the gnosis of personal identity through to the revelation of ‘no-self,’ and back to the world where we become beacons of deep love and transformation. In all cases the poetry in this collection emerges out of a conversation with the world at the edge of individual identity.  It is a call to inner revolution, of finding the authentic voice and using it to create transformation in both the human and other-than-human circles.

Praise for Songs from a Wild Place

“Jason Kirkey ventures into the interior places of the heart and shapes both their wildness and tenderness into a lyrical radiance that illuminates the outer world and what he calls ‘the places that are.’ As we read these poems, we wake up to a beauty that surrounds us even in moments of fear and surrender.”

—Tom Cowan, author of Yearning for the Wind

“Jason Kirkey’s new poetry collection, Songs From A Wild Place, is a delicious and—at times—overwhelmingly potent invitation to the introspective life; the kind of life that W.B. Yeats sometimes referred to as ‘a fierce life of quiet.’ Kirkey’s astonishing weave of the personal journey with transpersonal realities is sure to enthrall any awake-and-aware reader. All too often poetry is judged upon whether it is worthy of the reader. Here is poetry that demands that we—the reader—make ourselves worthy to receive it.”

—Frank MacEowen, author of The Mist-Filled Path and The Celtic Way of Seeing