Surfing the Torrent
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2023
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Publisher's Description
Surfing the Torrent is about a quest for truth, goodness, and beauty in a world that increasingly questions their very existence. The first of the two parts consists of poems derived from experiences in Greece revealing the birth of love for the place, and a woman of that place, the author's wife. The second part expands to journeys to Europe, India, Taiwan, China, Japan, and through the US, all of which contribute to the winding road. The poems explore varying worldviews and religions, eventually discovering theosis and spiritual growth. Humor plays a role, as it too can be revelatory. The reader is invited to enjoy the poems in a way that is elusive in much modern poetry.
Endorsements (3)
“Jonathan Chaves is a translator of genius and a poet whose own work evinces profound attentiveness, sacramental tenderness, and emotions that, in the words of the Chinese poet Yüan Hung-tao (whose poems Chaves has beautifully translated), have ‘the lucidity of calm waters.’”
“This book is a haunting excursion through the beaches and coves of Greece, hills and mountains, groves, valleys, and gardens, filled with fishermen, women, shepherds, and tributes to personal friends. Jonathan Chaves is at home in free verse, the ballade, the villanelle, the sonnet, heroic couplets, and perfectly crafted quatrains, and at ease with classical allusions, and reminiscences that stretch from the Buddha up through Marlowe, Wordsworth, Blake, and Arthur Waley. This collection showcases a poet of many talents and diverse interests.”
“Surfing the Torrent provides the reader with two books in one: a chapbook of free verse poems from a long-ago sojourn in Greece, marked by rhythmic mastery and vivid imagery, and a full-length collection of poems written over many years, exhibiting a variety of styles, moods, and subjects—blunt satires, touching elegies, philosophical and eschatological meditations—and characterized by the formal skill that Jonathan Chaves has displayed throughout his distinguished career as a translator.”
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