Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree, Poems by Edward Dougherty
In Edward Dougherty’s Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree, a Westerner makes a journey East—and toward his deepest self. Dougherty’s graceful poems at once evoke a sense of timelessness and deep historicity:
The scene in this flaming place
burned into people
after the atomic bomb turned
everything to shadows or ashes.
Is this what you came to poetry for?
The gingko tree faced into the wind
and stood against the blast. Still,
you can sit under its thick arms
and catch a flash of sunlight
in a porcelain blue sky.
Sample Poems by Edward Dougherty
“This book grew out of Edward Dougherty’s witness while he and his wife were volunteer directors of the World Friendship Center. 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 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
“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
“Edward A. Dougherty knows the hibakusha, the bomb-affected, and sees them passing as the big light ‘...turned/everything to shadows or ashes./Is this what you came to poetry for?’ Yes. This is what I came to poetry for. I have been privileged for many years to delight in Dougherty’s poetry, his unsympathetic pithing with the unflinching probe of his steady eye and confident voice.”—Robert Bixby, Editor/Publisher of March Street Press, Parting Gifts
ISBN 978-1933456980, 80 pages, $17.00