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Pause...In the course of a few conscious breaths learn to change your relationship with your thoughts and discover your quiet place within. This short practical book will help you find relief from the stress caused by listening to and believing the nonstop thoughts running around in your head. Pause is an easy exercise that cuts through the internal chatter. With practice, it can change your life. If you believe you are too busy to find relief from the incessant thoughts that fill every waking moment, this book is for you.

In the tradition of cultural historian and geologian Thomas Berry at the Riverdale Center for Religious Research, Fr. Conlon composed programs and reflections at Springbank Retreat in Kingstree, South Carolina, during his retirement years. He says, "Awaken to something entirely new, a time to make possible a world of beauty where each human and other-than-human can flourish and thrive."

In this wide-ranging, lively, and insightful book, which begins with an account of the vicissitudes of American political poetry, George Franklin addresses the poetry, and in some cases the poetics, of Frost, Stevens, and Williams. Two subsequent, more personal essays discuss the generative role that reading has played in his own life as a poet. The book concludes with chapters on Hopkins, Mallarme, and Celan. Franklin is particularly alert to the various ways that the work of many of these poets address spiritual concerns in an increasingly secular age. Erudite yet accessible, Voicing Orpheus seeks to engage both those with a special interest in poetry and with the common reader.

In this revelatory book, poet George Franklin describes his encounters with illustrious figures in the arts who taught, mentored, or inspired him, and provides extended commentaries on some of their most characteristic creations. Equal parts memoir and critical study, it illuminates the lives and works of artists he came to admire and in some cases to revere, in the process tracing the ways they informed his own sense of vocation as a writer.His relationships with the great modern dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins and the trailblazing composer Lucia Dlugoszewski prove as nourishing and illuminating to him as his interactions with such literary luminaries as Elizabeth Bishop, William Maxwell, Robert Lowell, Marie Ponsot, and Robert Fitzgerald. Franklin writes in his preface to this volume: "From all of these artists, I have learned of the importance of attending to that which even the most well-chosen, resonant words, the most expressive, exorbitant, and skillfully executed physical gestures, the most beguiling, enthralling, or overwhelming arrangements of notes, can never quite express, but which it is the burden and joy of the artist, nevertheless, to try to express."Anyone interested in the arts, either as practitioner or as enthusiast, will find here much to delight, intrigue, and inspire.

In this unique and compelling book, the author examines side by side the works of Eastern mystical philosophers and poets and some of their Western counterparts, not attempting to assimilate them to each other, but rather to observe what sparks of insight fly when their writings are brought into alignment. He focuses throughout on their various conceptions of the imagination and, more broadly, of consciousness itself.In the first part of the book, he reads the work of the great American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens, using as a framework the philosophy and aesthetics of Abhinavagupta, a tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic. In subsequent parts, he goes on to explore affinities between a wide range of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Sufi philosophers and poets and a number of Western authors, focusing in particular on Blake, Keats, and Shelley.In prose both clear and seductively lyrical, the author invites the reader to explore spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic vistas, at first no doubt unfamiliar, in which he or she gradually becomes more and more at home. Throughout Some Segments of a River, the author’s aim is to open up these vistas and to stir the reader’s own intuitive and imaginative powers—powers that are applicable to any endeavor and that quite simply, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “help us to lead our lives.”