Listening

New & Selected Work

by Charles Entrekin

Available for $16 from your local bookstore or
www.amazon.com

From the Back Cover

Enlightenment, it can be said, is a stringing together of momentary blissful connections. Each of these poems is indeed such a moment. As a book they string together one's life, that portion of one's life that can be said by a poet with the power of language at his command:

"We are no longer strangers.
She lies beside me in sunlight,
and already I know her like a memory."

Listening: New & Selected Works is such a stringing together, and somewhere in the beauty of the language there is an awakening, the poet's for sure, and ours if we let it. We could say life is a stringing together of momentary blissful connections, the good and the beautiful, that stay with us and both define and illuminate our lives. And that does not negate the terrible. The terrible allows us to draw truth to our journey as well. Charles, through a perfection of his gift, allows us to connect these moments and enjoy his enlightened journey

Book Reviews

Cutthroat trout, like good poems, are hard to catch. Charles Entrekin not only casts well, he catches a lot more than he loses.
Richard Hugo, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir

In Listening: New and Selected Works, Charles Entrekin presents us with a remarkable poetic legacy. Written between 1975 and the present, the poems in this collection are passionate and darkly lyric. Always grounded in physical reality, they transcend time and place, revealing both the great and small moments of life as seen from the perspective of eternity.
Mary Mackey, The Widow's War

Love, family, inevitable loss, desire: the very oldest songs, strongly sung anew by Charles Entrekin, whose life-affirming, death-defying word-gifts can make us see even that "rose red blush" on the breasts of the beloved.
Thomas Farber, The Beholder

These are a man's poems, about men and women, and sometimes children. Poems that see the distance between what we need in life and what we can get. I love the frankness in Entrekin's writing and trust it's moments of pleasure and hope.
Alicia Ostriker, The Crack in Everything

A Note from the Author

The cover is from a painting by a Rumanian Artist, a woman, and I bought it on College Avenue from a Berkeley Art dealer in the early 1980’s, when I couldn’t afford it, when I was separated from my wife at the time, because it spoke to me and I couldn’t resist it.

LISTENING has a couple themes that I’d like to draw attention to:

• Surrendering – a difficult concept, what do I mean?
  • surrendering to the reality of transience and to the connectedness of all experience;
  • surrendering in order to let go of that fight over things over which we have no control;
  • surrendering in order to slow down and pay attention;
  • surrendering in order to become wakeful to the complexities and the connectedness of what it means to be alive.
• Legacy
  • what we inherit from our culture, our neighborhood, and our gene pool;
  • it is what we breathe in from childhood, what we ground ourselves in as adults, because it inform us as to who we are, provides us with possibilities, teaches us , loves us, hurts us, keeps us sane, tells us how to be, and how not to be.

For further information, or to book a reading, contact: vgrudd@hotmail.com