kin press

Jeffery Beam

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

An intense “marvelous and fateful game,” a six-month blogosphere collaboration between a Welsh painter and an American poet, Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements details a Hero’s journey through death, resurrection, psychological and spiritual trials and revelations into redemptive vision. Originating loosely in an ancient Welsh folk tradition and the death of the painter’s father, painter and poet marry their impressive powers of myth and dream into individual but sympathetically resonant designs—inward landscapes wrought startlingly real—at turns plain and flamboyant, poignant and joyful. “The grace of these paintings and poems is in their wildness,” fashioned ultimately by Hicks-Jenkins’ and Beam’s compassionate confrontation with dark forces, reviving forgotten knowing and healing powers, as pilgrim/hero meets Horse/Man, thus “patching up some almighty tear in the fabric of heaven” and the searching self.

Description: 92 pages, 8.5 x 0.2 x 8.5 inches, 15 poems, 1 song, 3 essays, 21 full page color illustrations, additional full-color vignettes, full-color end pages. ISBN 978-0998929316 ~ $24.95 USD

Available worldwide. You may purchase online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or request through your local bookstore. The first 500 purchasers can receive from the poet, upon request, a CD recording of the poems (details inside book). Booksellers: contact your distributor or Ingram (800-937-8000 or thinkbooks@ingramcontent.com).

From the back cover

“And so, before the totally singular manifestation of this visionary work, I humbly call on William Rossetti, in the 19th century, who said, in his awe before the Illuminated Books of Blake: The genius ‘is not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors.’”  –Poet Kent Johnson. Author of Homage to the Last Avant-Garde and I Once Met: A Partial Memoir of the Poetry Field.

“After Postmodern dismembering, now horribly enacted in the political sphere, comes hope where alienation is addressed and danced into healing by body, ecstasy and myth. The result in this superb work is a shamanic re-membering that renews self, consciousness, being and world. Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements is an extraordinary and numinous collaboration between a poet and painter that invokes the archaic roots of art itself in the Paleolithic caves where ritual, religion, painting and song were born. Uniting word and paint by reconnecting with pre-Christian rites in Europe, Native American heritage and the intense participation in the collaborative must made possible by the internet, Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements is soul food; it shapes dark energies into the emerging of new being. Archetypal, Jungian and visionary; this book’s amazing art is an inspirational treatment for modern suffering.” –Dr. Susan Rowland Professor, Pacifica Graduate Institute. Author of Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C. G. Jung and James Hillman and Jung: A Feminist Revision.

“I can think of no other poet than the true bard, Jeffery Beam, who so elegantly, so riskily, layers into his language plain-speak and grandeur. Spectral Pegasus marshals with palpable force the library that is Beam’s heart, the garden that is his imagination, distilled through the maestro’s ear and the provocateur’s wit. He folds language into an entirely new province, something all its own, wholly original, yet gathering the tribes and kin of its influence, of its own making. When he writes in ‘The Quickening,’ ‘My daily urge walks a land without similarity teeming,’ I can only rejoinder with Amen. This is a gorgeous book by a simply splendid poet.” –Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti. Author of Half of What I Say Is Meaningless, The 13th Sunday after Pentecost, and co-editor of the forthcoming The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry.

“Beam’s is a startled and startling, all-body, all-spirit response to the gift and terror that rode roughshod and wondrous into his creative life like an annunciation, in the form of Hicks-Jenkins’s numinous, luminous horse.” –Poet Damian Walford Davies. Head, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University. Author of Alabaster Girls, and Docklands.