Edward Dougherty

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Press Bio

I am the author of Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree (WordTech Communications) and Part Darkness, Part Breath (Plain View Press) as well as four chapbooks of poetry, the most recent of which is The Luminous House (Finishing Line Press). My textbook, Exercises for Poets: Double Bloom, co-authored with Scott Minar, is available from Prentice-Hall. In 2007, I was honored to receive the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. After I finished my MFA at Bowling Green, Ohio, my spouse and I volunteered at a peace center in Hiroshima for two and a half years. We now live and work in Corning, New York, and are active in our Quaker Meeting. [Read his full bio.]

Press Release:  Award Winning Poet to lead workshop

Press Release:  Poet Publishes two "First Books"




Pilgrimage to a Gingko About Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree
See the publisher's website at WordTech Communications
http://www.wordtechweb.com/order.htm
For purchase from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Pilgrimage.


What people are saying about Pilgrimage:

These are powerfully attentive poems, alert to the ghosts of what is no longer here, as well as to the relentless beauty that remains in the natural world, in a Zen garden, and in Impressionist paintings. With an understated elegance and a steadfast allegiance to the difficulties of language about atrocities, Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree is a brave and important book for these times.

-- Maggie Anderson, director of the Wick Poetry Program at Kent State University
     and author of Windfall: New & Selected Poems

 

The poems set standards for other poets. The book's sections outline the ways of the pilgrim who goes out of himself to find a way to his center.

--Van K. Brock, founder of Anhinga Press, poetry editor at the International
    Quarterly and author of Lightered: New and Selected Poems.

 

These are deeply serious, compassionate poems, steeped in personal responsibility and in the beauty of austere landscapes and stark calligraphic images. Edward Dougherty’s Japan celebrates raucous crows, rivers and deltas, and especially the gingko. These are also love-poems: love of human courage and survival, poems of vulnerability and love. Explicitly in some cases, and implicitly through-out the book, they are poems of married love and joyful companionship. They avoid elaborate metaphor so we feel invited into quietness, respectful listening and seeing, personal care for lives we have never seen.

--Paul A. Lacey, literary executor for Denise Levertov and author of The Inner
    War: Forms and Themes in Recent American Poetry
and Growing into
    Goodness: Essays on Quaker Education.




Pilgrimage to a Gingko About Part Darkness, Part Breath
See the publisher's website at Plain View Press
http://www.plainviewpress.net
For purchase from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/homepage

What people are saying about Part Darkness, Part Breath:

There are precious few poets who have, as Dougherty clearly demonstrates, the courage and wisdom to confront our most brutal acts through such healing gestures as spirituality, marital love, community, nature, and -as if in conscious defiance of Auden- a language that makes something happen, that "receives such suffering/and responds with hospitality." In poems that range from the tragedies of the atomic bomb to the passion of domestic love, Dougherty, against our most destructive impulses, offers habits "of attention."

--Phil Terman, author of Rabbis of the Air and House of Sages.


Extras & Downloads

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