Beach Synchronization: Selected Poems by Len Blanchard - Hardcover

Blanchard, Len

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1481777262 ISBN 13: 9781481777261

Publisher: AuthorHouse, 2013

Synopsis

The sixty poems collected in Beach Synchronization are set either on the ocean, or on the beach, or in transit to or from the beach or, finally, in the mind of the narrator when he is simply thinking about the beach and the ocean. The first person narrator of these poems is the poet. This suggests what is indeed fact, that the poet has spent a great deal of time enjoying the many beautiful beaches along the west central Florida coast. However, while the beach is often beautiful, anyone who has spent any time near or on the ocean knows marine weather can be harsh, even life-threatening. Indeed, the beach is an arena where dramas of life and death are played out daily. To truly appreciate the shore and the ocean, then, one must respect the marine environment and the lessons it has to teach us. One must, in other words, be in synch with the various moods of the sea and nature. The poems herein are loosely organized around the premise that the moods of the sea and marine weather have their various rhythms. An overarching theme of the poems is that one who is in tune with the rhythms of marine life will find himself or herself in communion with a transcendent reality. In other words, one who is synchronized to the natural world is likely to feel that the world of the senses is not the only world. In many of the poems in this collection, the narrator is overcome with a premonition or an inkling that the world he knows with his senses provides evidence of a higher reality, a reality in which the significance of his human experience - whatever it has been -- will become fully clear and will be justified.

About this title

About the Author

Len Blanchard holds a B.A. degree in English from Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in English from Emory University where he was an NDEA Fellow. Employed for several years as a corporate and business writer in Dallas and Little Rock, he began writing seriously upon his relocation to Florida in 1990. Since 1999, he has taught as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Language and Literature at State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota. In 2001, Blanchard published through AuthorHouse An American Passion, an epic narrative poem on the life of Crazy Horse, the great war chief of the Oglala Lakota Sioux. He is also the author of hundreds of poems. A few of these poems celebrating the life of the beaches of the Florida coast were published in a collection entitled Provocations of the Birds and the Beach in 2005 by Bellowing Ark Press of Seattle. In 2012, Blanchard published through AuthorHouse a metaphysical drama entitled The First Day: Albert Camus meets Crazy Horse in the Kingdom and another collection of poems, People Matter: Sarasota Portraits and Others. His poems have appeared in numerous national magazines and journals, and he has been nominated on three occasions for a Pushcart Prize. A native of Connecticut, he is now at home in Bradenton, Florida.

Edition details

• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1481777262
• ISBN 13: 9781481777261
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 168