Press Release
Edward A. Dougherty, author of four chapbooks, or small collections of poetry, saw the publication of his first and second books in the same year. Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree is a series of 40 poems written while the author was a volunteer at a peace center in Hiroshima, Japan. It is by WordTech Communications, LLC, a for-profit poetry publisher out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Part Darkness, Part Breath is a meditation on the nature of violence and war and the human spirit's capacity both to endure and resist it. This book, published by Plain View Press of Austin, TX, gathers poems from more than 15 years of writing poetry. Dougherty earned his Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from Bowling Green State University in 1991 and has been writing and publishing poems ever since. He has won awards for his work, such as the New Eden Chapbook Award for his gathering called Small Galaxies and the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activities. A community college professor, he has presented at the national conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) as well as at teacher's conferences in New York State. "It's just a fluke, " "It's nothing I did. One was accepted years ago but the production schedule was long enough that the other one also was accepted and went into print in the meantime. But he's pleased by the synchronicity. "While very different, these two books have intertwined roots," Dougherty said. "They both explore the role of violence and healing, of war and love, and through and around all that is the pervasive wonder of the natural world." Pilgrimage deals largely with the time the author and his spouse served as volunteer directors of the World Friendship Center, a small peace center in Hiroshima, Japan. Since 1965, the World Friendship Center has hosted guests, put on cross-cultural programs, sponsored a Peace Exchange Program (PAX), first between Japan and the US and now including Korea and Germany. "As resident directors, we greeted visitors and arranged for them to meet survivors of the atomic bombing or to tour Peace Park, if they wanted, or just welcomed them in the evening with tea and conversation. It was very informal." But it was also very busy. Dougherty and his spouse were directors at the Center from 1993 through 1995, the 50th anniversary of the bombing and the end of the war. "The number of visitors and events just kept increasing," Dougherty said, and yet he kept writing poems. "I wrote about visits to Peace Park, which we did at least a couple of times a month, about going out to a rice-farming village about 45 minutes outside the city, about the horrible events in Rwanda at the time, and so much more." There are many poems in the collection that respond to paintings by van Gogh, Monet, and O'Keefe. Paul Lacey, professor emeritus at Earlham College, has written that Dougherty's poems are not just about war. "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." While Part Darkness, Part Breath is a more varied collection, it continues similar themes. "I originally drafted some of these poems during what we unfortunately have to call the First Gulf War, in 1991, but many of them after we returned from Japan." They confront the rage and sorrow of wartime, especially in the section called "The Metal of My Mouth." Because of these overlapping concerns, Dougherty sees the books as a continuous whole. "Having these two books appear at the same time makes me think of musicians," Dougherty says. "It's like they're a double album." The concept of a pilgrim, a traveler on a purpose, also appears in Part Darkness, Part Breath extending the central metaphor in Pilgrimage. "We were moving a great deal in those years," Dougherty says, "and so it was important to meditate on ideas of home and hospitality, friendship and community." One aspect of life that provided continuity and stability is his relationship with his spouse, and so more poems deal directly with his married relationship and the sacredness of that loving commitment. Together these two books of poetry are a testimony to the creative enterprise, the long years and the slow ripening of the work, and the ultimate transformation of everyday life into art - no matter if that daily work is in a foreign country or in the backyard garden. |
