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"...A gull comes eyeing, tunes to my seeking,
tips a wing in greeting:
That is the teaching.
-From "Guru on Ice," Winner, Poetic Journeys 2004-2005
Plunge directly into the heart of being. Each poem brings a moment of awareness, an invitation to feel the silence around the words. The poetry and journal entries are a memoir of Shaw's eight summers on retreat in Chandolin, Switzerland. The section "Writing Your Yoga" offers indications about how to write your own poems for presence.
Winner of two national awards for poetry, Fran Shaw, Ph.D., is the author of "50 Ways to Help You Write," numerous book reviews, articles, textbooks, and the Write It Up video course. A Danforth Fellow and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, she is Associate Professor of English teaching writing at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. She has guided writing workshops across the country for the past twenty years.
"With these poems, Fran Shaw opens a new era of poetry-an era of genuine hope. There has never been anything quite like them in the whole history of poetry. Blessed by a sojourn in high places of the earth and of the spirit, she is here able, again and again, to fulfill William Blake's prophecy, 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite...' I have kept various watchwords before me in poetry writing groups, but Shaw has brought me, shiningly realized, what I was groping toward. I am profoundly grateful for these poems. For a little while after I finished reading them, I saw with those eyes. When I looked up, outside my window the lilac bush stirring in the wind was the teaching."
--Martha Heyneman, author of The Breathing Cathedral
"Few writers can capture the essence of a moment as spot-on as Shaw. In Writing My Yoga, her spiritual journey leads to a realization that the best way to live and write is to be reborn - not once a lifetime, but once a second."
--Allia Zobel-Nolan, Senior Editor, Reader's Digest Books
"As poet and teacher of the writing craft, Fran Shaw shares with us the intimate process that leads to self-knowledge and self-expression: the distillation of moments of being into a poem as delicately as dew forming on a single leaf."
--Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt, Ph.D., author of
"Rene Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide"
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