Ash and Embers: Poems: 27 (Poiema Poetry)

Ash & Embers embodies the inherent messiness of lifes journey sorting detritus from treasures identifying and naming memory finding categories that reflect lifes winding pathways and its treacherous footing. Taking his various roles--son brother husband father grandfather neighbor teacher citizen believer writer and reader--as narrative stances Zoller considers the details of life and its larger forces. Thematically complex Ash & Embers accepts that the journey is translated through the often difficult tool of language; thus it embraces the tension that language is inadequate alien and paradoxically a tool for recognition and understanding. In Zollers poems how we speak about life--as physical passage as spiritual pilgrimage as imagined patterns as emotional canvas as interwoven narrative strands and as social construct--all these voices meet in one conversation. Between Photographs that begins the book and Hard Copy that brings it to a close we find everything from first impressions to Second Knowings from notes on the poems of Mao and Seamus Heaney to prayers to the God of time eternity and love.