In The Broken Flower poet Jeffery Beam journeys beyond merely human stories into the radiant IS - the I AM hidden in earthly shadows and gleaming foliage and skies. Poems written over several decades coalesce "not just to say / this or / that / But ... to say / what is between." In their "words' melancholic / swarm" Beam finds human feeling in Nature's broad manifest, a world ripe with anniversaries - of the bobwhite, the copperhead, owls, tree frogs, deer, apples and persimmons, mountain fogs and river rhythms, Monet, Cathar spirits, Paracelsus, Lazarus, and falling stones - affirming that "there is a reason for being here / ... however / it insinuates itself into you." The Broken Flower, Emersonian in its scope and wisdom, seeks not the perfect, but the infinite in the quotidian, the "unrestrainable / heart" within "the last place we would think /to look // ... in the discarded shattered world," where the stem-less flower proves to be "the most perfect flower" because it is broken. These poems fulfill William Carlos Williams' maxim of writing for "the pursuit of beauty, and the husk that remains." The Broken Flower is a work, in which the awkward, the broken, and the common welcome the reader with verity, wholeness, and grace.
