Recoveries by Peter Snow
$14.99
Peter Snow, storyteller and poet, skillfully interweaves his narrative with a more lyrical voice. Headed by Pascal’s famous dictum, ‘the heart has reasons that reason knows nothing about,’ these sixteen pieces invite us into a language that describes the world in the gaps between. Mountains, a barking dog, a doctor polishing his glasses as he talks to patients give the reader some firm ground, yet such images returning page by page in a kind of musical metamorphosis challenge us either to surrender to those ‘reasons that we know nothing of’ or to stand bewildered. The writer’s one-time work as a psychiatric nurse gives substance to his central theme… that a word filled with imagination can heal fragile minds and fractured relationships. Reading this, another chamber in the heart begins to open.
–Paul Matthews, author of Sing Me the Creation and This Naked Light
When Recoveries asks, Our life in this world, what is it like? it provides no fill-in-the-blank answer. It instead leads us past the faces of people and things and into what may exist underneath: the four (or possibly—somehow—five) chambers of the heart. Whose heart? Yours. Ours. The planet’s, shaking with the concussions of a war. This book is like a vivid cross-section cut of the human experience—depending on whether you enter it as a tourist or a student, you will either be wowed or softly, insistently awoken. Either way, this lost-in-time, thoughtful foray into beingness and love is generous with its quiet gifts.
–Elisabeth Blair, author of We He She/It and without saying
Recoveries plays along the wavering horizon that separates wakefulness and dream, with the sharp reality of the human mind hovering above, and the elusive vista of imaginings below. Within this visionscape, Snow infuses a dramatic and compelling storyline, delving into spiritual and physical wellbeing, healing, complexities of the heart, and the nature of human cognizance. Snow’s language, too, undulates between expert precision and evocative abstraction. An expansive fountain of ideas surges through these elegant poems, and reaches beyond verisimilitude toward what we all most deeply understand to be true.
–Elaine Pentaleri, co-editor of Mud Season Review
Description
Recoveries
by Peter Snow
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-523-9
2021
This chapbook was made possible in part by donations to the ONE LAST WORD Program. ONE LAST WORD helps to bring the last works of gifted poets to the world.
Recoveries is a sequence of prose poems weaving philosophy, spirit, relationships, and psychiatry. The poems follow interactions between a doctor and patients, yet shimmer with wonderment.
Peter Snow was an English and drama teacher, bartender, warehouse worker, goatherd, and psychiatric nurse. He immigrated to the United States from Scotland in 2017. As a storyteller, he performed in diverse venues across the US and Europe, from tea shops to open fields. He is the author of A Rosslyn Treasury and The Shifty Lad (Floris Books).
Andrzej Tereszkowski –
In Recoveries, the author creates a universe you see and interact with through a scrim, operating just out of sight and leading to a hidden chamber of the heart. Set against the backdrop of war and mediated through the lens of medical professionals justifying and rationalizing on behalf of the narrator, crisp imagery and detail are processed by a musing and striving for more granular depth and understanding of those details. Each verse takes the reader farther from the backdrop of the violent war and psychiatric intervention, to scratch a hidden itch set just out of reach by the author. Behind every scene, description, narrative, there is a burning desire to prescribe an extra ounce of meaning, and there are so many fibers and threads to weave a rope and descend into the lower chambers, and a constant invitation to dive even deeper and wonder.