Verdant

Reminiscent of Eastern Bhakti love poetry, and Western Troubadour and Green Man traditions, Verdant recounts a mid-life passage within a shadowed natural landscape of intense physical and spiritual longing. At the age of 42, queer poet Jeffery Beam fell in love with a younger man, threatening his then 15-year relationship. These poems were born of that spiritual alchemical blaze, and its substantial healing power. The poet-lover's sacred quest through heartbreak, suffering, grief, and regret, progresses ultimately to a joyful ecstatic reunion with the Beloved Divine. A mini-essay, "Don't Forget Love: Sacred Longing's Dark Project," further illuminates the actual, mythological, and spiritual origins of the poems, and describes the poet's lifetime search through experience, teachings, and literature, to a condition in which Desire and Love enrich instead of subsume the Self.