The Crooked Truth

by Dan Guenther

Dan Guenther is a poet for all seasons who speaks to us through unique imagery and often brilliant contrast about his many years walking the western landscape, the old Ute trails in Colorado, foreign lands, and a war-torn countryside. His deep relationship with the natural world, and all its creatures has a way of healing, making connections, and balancing one's life in the great scheme of living and dying. In silence and solitude and in secret places, from Vietnam to a winter campsite, he ponders the big questions, and we listen. His meditations on time, space and light, ancient cliff dwellers and new beginnings, awaken the poet in us. We feel his compassion and respect for all things living...and dead. The world of the night heron, wolverine, mule deer, and lynx, all hold mystical truths for him.

76 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2010

About the author

Dan Guenther is the author of five novels and two collections of poetry. He was a captain in the Marine Corps and his Vietnam trilogy is based on his combat experiences in Southeast Asia.

His award-winning fourth novel, Glossy Black Cockatoos, is set in Australia and Laos following the Fall of Saigon. The Crooked Truth, his second collection of poetry, was the 2011 Colorado Authors' League award selection for poetry (books). Guenther is a graduate of Coe College and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Reviews

[Michael Whalen]

Favorite verse:

"9 – The Ninth Meditation

The dense gases and star clusters
of the Milky Way glow overhead;
and Orion draws his long bow across the sky.

Connected to some other place in the larger scheme
you try to forget the anger within, letting everything flow,
slipping the boundaries through meditation.

Maybe it is true that divinity lies dormant within us,
a mystery waiting to rise again from the ages,
from the marble pagodas of Vietnam to these eroded sandstone
shapes once worshipped by the Utes:

My friend, Klaus, the nominalist,
believes the universal essences of reality are a fiction,
and that the mind can frame no single concept
to any valid term or corresponding image.

I disagree, having seen Evil hanging in the trees,
with tangled guts out and swinging in the breeze,
a sickening validity found in those private parts
still left bloody and fly-ridden on the ground.

In the black infinitudes of the night
the bones of that giant hunter slain by Artemis
rest in a glinting ossuary hidden among the stars;

And when our sun finally explodes
the earth in its death throes
will become a dead husk, all our remains
mere embers in the great galactic arc."

from "Listening Through the Silences: Nine Meditations" for Itzhak Bentov