Old Tale Road

by Andrew Schelling

Poetry. OLD TALE ROAD, Andrew Schelling's first full collection of poetry in six years, is a visionary work of crisply detailed language and wide-ranging content. It balances the ecological, mythic, and personal realms, while carrying the flavor of American ballads or blues. There are poems in haibun form, lyric songs, linked-verse, and a Noh play. The personae of OLD TALE ROAD include friends, ghosts, lovers, Buddhist monks, dead poets, mountain spirits, and the strangely named animals of the American West. "Andrew Schelling is the latest incarnation in an American poetic lineage that began with the Transcendentalists and moved west with Rexroth and the unlikely and fortuitous conjunction of wilderness expertise, the observational precision of a natural historian, homegrown radical politics, and an immersion in Asian philosophy and writing"—Eliot Weinberger.

105 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 2008

About the author

Andrew Schelling is a poet, essayist, and translator of the poetry of India. He has taught at Naropa University for twenty years and from 1993–96 served as chair of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics founded by Alan Ginsburg and Anne Waldman. His publications include Tea Shack Interior and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Reviews

[James Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another wonderful book by an underrated American poet. While seemingly casual on the surface, his poems slowly yield up ghost geologies, bits of ancient scored potsherds, fragments of lost or marginal languages and all other manner of highly charged notebook sorcery.