Hiraeth Press
Catalog 2011
Hiraeth Press is a publisher with a mission. We are passionate about creativity as a means of transforming consciousness, both individually and socially. We hope to participate in a revolution to return poetry to the public discourse and a place in the world which matters. Of the many important issues of our times we feel that our relationship to the environment is of the most fundamental concern. Our publications reflect the ideal that falling in love with the earth is nothing short of revolutionary and that through our relationship to nature we can birth a more enlightened vision of life for the future. We believe that art and poetry are the universal language of the human experience and are thus most capable of transforming our vision of self and world. We publish a wide range of books that deal with our relationship to the Earth and the revitalization of an ecologically viable spirituality fit for the planetary era. Although we specialize in poetry we also produce nonfiction books as well, such as the award-winning The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality by Jason Kirkey, the Courting the Wild series edited by Jamie K. Reaser and the award-winning title, Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism and the Birth of a New Myth by Theodore Richards. What does Hiraeth mean? The Welsh word hiraeth encapsulates the spirit by which we strive and that the books we publish hope to inspire. A direct translation of the word might be something like “longing,” though a more literary reading and a look at its role in medieval Welsh poetry reveals that it is a deep longing of the soul for one’s original homeland. Here at Hiraeth Press we believe that our collective human homeland are the still-wild places of the Earth. We long for a more ecologically and spiritually sane world and believe passionately that poetry is a form of activism on behalf of the more-than-human world. How environmentally friendly is the press? We endeavor to be as environmentally sustainable as possible, and will continue to raise our standards as we are able. Our website is hosted by Sustainable Websites and is 100% offset by wind power. Additionally we make use of print-on-demand technology, allowing us to print only what we need without the typical waste of resources associated with offset printing.
Hiraeth Press PO Box 1442, Pawcatuck, CT 06379-1968 Contact: Leslie M. Browning Director of Promotion lmbrowning@hiraethpress.com General email: info@hiraethpress.com | Orders: orders@hiraethpress.com www.hira e thp re ss.co m
Winner of an IPPY Gold Medal Distributed by Ingram Price: $17.95 ISBN: 978-0979924682 Paperback: 5.5 x 8.5 Length: 350 Pages Subject: Religion, Mythology 40% Discount Offered to Bookstores When Purchased Through Publisher w ww.c osmos ophia. c om
“Theodore Richards is a unique and gifted social activist, one with a well nourished brain as well as a conscience. His commitment to inner city youth wounded as so many are by a culture that prefers consumption to compassion and preaches couchpotatoitism over creativity, he has spent years bringing alive the potential of young people in finding their in-depth selves and their place in our amazing universe. In a previous generation someone of Theodore's depth and integrity might have worked out his vocation in a monastery. In our time, he finds his way in the urban world of struggle and promise, despair and hope. He is a philosopher-activist who listens deeply and walks his talk. What he is learning is worth our all listening to. —Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing and The Hidden Spirituality of Men Theodore Richards - is a poet, writer, and religious philosopher. He is a long time student of the Taoist martial art of Bagua and hatha yoga and has traveled, worked and studied in 25 different countries, including the South Pacific, the Far East, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Richards has received degrees from the University of Chicago, The California Institute of Integral Studies, Wisdom University, and the New Seminary where he was ordained. He is the author of Comosophia and Handprints on the Womb, a collection of poetry. Theodore Richards is the founder and executive director of The Chicago Wisdom Project. He currently resides in Chicago with his wife and daughter.
Note to Self Cry. Expand. Let the longings that tug at your heart be the strings of your Sun Dance. Kneel. Pray. Surrender to your Destiny the glory of who you are meant to be. Listen. Speak. The Truth chimes in your ears. It has always done so. Now you must give it resonance in your lungs and across your vocal chords.
“Jamie K. Reaser is a rare bird, indeed: a mystic naturalist, a gifted poet, and a virtuoso guide to soul. With the Siren song of her seductive verse, this chthonic critter will grab you by the ankles and draw you down toward the ecstatic and terrifying mysteries of the one life you can call your own, your one true gift for this breaking world. She knows well this fruitful darkness by virtue of her own long sojourn below, as these astonished pages attest. Note to Self: Once you surrender to Jamie’s poems, all resistance is futile. Turn off the lights on the way in.” —Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., Author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche and Nature and the Human Soul
Distributed by Ingram Price: $15.95 ISBN: 978-0979924699 Paperback: 8.0 x 5.5 / 160 Pages Subject: Self-Help, Poetry 40% Discount Offered to Bookstores When Purchased Through Publisher
Remove your shoes and your limiting beliefs. Make love to the Earth with every footfall. Her’s is the most intimate relationship available to a human. Look. See. Your purpose vision dwells within your eyes. All three. Extend. Hold. The hand, the body that you embrace is the Other’s salvation and your own. We are physical beings because Spirit knows what it takes to birth a miracle. Love. Because that’s what you were born to do.
World as Church Just think of the blossoming parsnip, or the button quail as divinity, try to see the rising moon as so or the touch of the iris tongue, also the early hawk as it perches on the black oak or the thin lanky hindquarters of the ant, the matted camellias thundering the porch with petal, discover the small motes of the dried pea, its husk like the cry of the pine cricket, and the dogma of arroyos and snow-melt, the passion of needle grass and berries and mistletoe in December when it reaches out to us with is heady midriff ; the world is church, is chapel, altar, blood, and body in its soft skin and its fervor, in all the salt-vacancies of the ocean in dawn and dusk, the affirmation of God collects in the russet-headed grass of summer and in the tattered fungi and the fistfuls of snails and sand verbena and the wings of the sycamore; the hedgehog in his hole knows the wisdom of Leviticus, considers passages from Proverbs because his face is always open to the glaze of morning, as is the nude body of the seahorse under the ocean’s momentum, everything of earth is the krill of the cathedral, the field and forest anticipates its potential as assuredly as the barn owl crouches to enwrap the vole with its talons, the gospel manifests itself in the facets of light and the falling of water, angels both of them, what more proof do we need that pollen hold reverence and constellations hold transformation, what proof exists at the core of the orb is there for our asking, there like any element, in abiding beauty, the wholeness of the finite fecund for our delight.
Leonore Wilson has taught at various uni-
versities and colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area. She continues to live on her family cattle ranch in Napa, California. She has won fellowships to the University of Utah and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. Her work has been in such magazines as Quarterly West, Madison Review, Third Coast, Poets Against the War and Nimble Spirit. She is the mother of three sons.
Distributed by Ingram Price: $13.95 ISBN: 978-0983585213 Paperback: 7 x 10 / 100 Pages Subject: Nature, Spirituality, Poetry 40% Discount Offered to Bookstores When Purchased Through Publisher
The poems in this book are an attempt to speak in a common tongue with mountains, rivers, and forests. Too often poetry is thought of as the domain of human creativity with its source in the depths of the imagination. We use it to speak of the world, but not to the non-human world—let alone with it. The poems in Estuaries suggest that speech and poetry are fundamentally rooted in the ecosystem—the detritus of fallen leaves, the curvature of a river bend, and the sound of rain on a heron’s wings. All of this might be regarded as the speech of the Earth. When we speak or write poetry that engages these voices we become participant in the patterns of the watershed.
Distributed by Ingram Price: $17.95 / ISBN: 978-0983585206 / Full-color Paperback: 8.5 x 8.5 / Length: 86 Pages Release: May 2011 / Subject: Ecology, Photography, Poetry / Returnable through Ingram 40% Discount Offered to Bookstores when purchased through publisher.
“There is poetry. Then there is poetry with insight; the kind that opens up luminous doors within the reader. NIGHT, MYSTERY & LIGHT is poetry of the door-flinging variety. Through an ongoing holy conversation with soul, and an ever-deepening glance at the nuanced details of the life always happening within and around us, J.K. McDowell's words help us to sweep away the cobwebs of tired perception and see the world anew. This is poetry that prepares the heart-mind to become an awake sky worthy of sunsets and sunrises.” — Frank Owen | Bodhiyatra Poetry
“One characteristic of the ghazal is that the poet’s name sometimes appears in the last verse. McDowell often ends his poems with a challenge to “Jim,” a question usually asking him to make sense of his life. Yet as we feel our way through the earlier stanzas, living within their diaphanous walls, we overhear this final question as if it were directed at us. One of the joys of reading McDowell’s poetry is precisely this—that his questions urge us to make deeper sense of our own lives. You will discover, along with him, the almost seamless way ordinary reality and the non-ordinary realities of our soul’s deep dreaming support and create a multi-layered world to live in—a world that intrigues us while reading the poem and that lingers long after we lay the poem aside.” — Excerpt from Forward by Tom Cowan, author of Yearning for the Wind
J. K. McDowell is an artist, poet and mystic, an Ohioan expat living in Cajun country. Always immersed in poetry, raised in Buckeye country by a mother who told of “Sam I Am,” “Danny Deaver” and Annabel Lee” and a father who quoted Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam. In the last decade a deepened study of poetry and shamanism and nature has inspired a regular practice of writing poetry that blossomed into the works presented in this collection. Lately, mixing Lorca and Lovecraft, McDowell lives twenty miles north of the Gulf Coast with his soul mate who also happens to be his wife and their two beautiful companion parrots.
Distributed by Ingram ISBN | 978-0-9835852-3-7 Price | $ 12.95 Length | 142 pgs Paperback | 5.5 x 8 20% Discount Offered through Ingram 40% Discount Offered to Bookstores when purchased through publisher.
Winner of an IPPY Silver Medal
“Here at the end of the Cenozoic Era with the life systems withering away, a surprising creativity appears, a kind of mystical balancing act. The world’s spiritual traditions are entering into deeply engaged conversations through which the riches of each are ignited in new ways. With The Salmon in the Spring, Jason Kirkey has boldly carved out his place in this exciting work with his original interpretations of the concepts and stories of ancient Ireland . . . Kirkey’s vision speaks directly to our present ecological challenge. Rejecting those nature-denying forms of spirituality that have been used too easily to justify our domestication of the planet, The Salmon in the Spring announces its thrilling spiritual foundation: “Our wild nature is our soul.” — Brian Swimme, California Institute of Integral Studies “When I listen to Jason Kirkey retell the old tales and the ancient truths from the Celtic mystical tradition, I am encouraged that the wisdom of our ancestors can still inspire a modern spiritual life. . .The Salmon in the Spring is an eloquent calling to be fully present and engaged in our time and place in both human and mythic history.” —Tom Cowan, author of Fire in the Head
In The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality ecological wisdom is married to a new interpretation of Celtic myth and tradition. As industrialized humans systematically degrade the ecology of the planet—polluting air, water, and soil; endangering wildlife to extinction; clear cutting old growth forests—we need to cultivate a new perception of the Earth, one which is capable of inspiring us toward the reinvention of ourselves and initiating us into the cosmos. Through a variety of stories and a deep exploration of the ecological crisis The Salmon in the Spring explores the possibility of a paradigm shift from an industrial worldview to one of ecological and spiritual wonder. This book calls readers to wake up to a new human story, one capable of ushering us into a new and ecologically balanced relationship with the living cosmos.
“The Salmon in the Spring is a bold book. It is bold because it—no less so than its author—isn’t content to rest back on its philosophical laurels and ponder by-gone eras. To the contrary, Kirkey and The Salmon in the Spring invite and initiate the reader into a deep dive within the interior space of the Celtic mystic, but in archetypal and pragmatic ways that make an important contribution to the domain of ecopsychology today.” — Frank MacEowen, author of The Mist-Filled Path, and The Spiral of Memory and Belonging
Distributed by Ingram ISBN-13: 978-0979924668 Paperback: 296 pages | 6 x 9 Price: $17.95 Subject: Celtic / Nature / Mythology 40% Discount offered to bookstores when purchased through publisher
“Jamie K. Reaser’s poems transport you into the natural world of Huntley Meadows, a magical place in the heart of the DC Metropolitan area. Her words are a welcoming awakening to a sense of nature, something many of us are losing and trying to regain.” — Gabriela Chavarria, PhD, Director of National Resource Defense Council Science Center “In the lineage of Oliver, Stegner, Lopez and Thoreau, Jamie K. Reaser’s exquisite year-long record, Huntley Meadows, guides us as readers to a sacred return. In this living homage to fur, feather, scale and root we remember the deep love possible for a place through the seasons. The spirit of a shaman-poet and the keen eye of a naturalist come together in these pages. The end result is a collection of verses wherein a special place is given a voice. Listening to such voices offers all of us resurrection and renewal.” — Frank Owen, creator of the online poetry experience, nekyia.poetry “Soulful and delicious appetizers of poems that make you want to visit Huntley Meadows every day and see what Dr. Reaser has seen. She makes the invisible suddenly visible, and beautiful.” — Kevin Munroe, Huntley Meadows, Park Manager
Distributed by Ingram
ISBN: 978-0-9799246-7-5 Price: $16.95 | 6x9 Paperback 214pgs Subject Poetry / Nature / Conservation 40% Discount offered to bookstores when purchased through publisher
“Jamie K. Reaser’s poetic account of a year in Huntley Meadows in the heart of Washington is a treasure. A toprank scientist committed to conservation biology, Reaser turns out to be a poet able to project images of the natural world that echo reality—and at the same time move the reader’s spirit. Read it and then go there!” — Donald Kennedy, PhD, President Emeritus of Stanford University
Huntley Meadows is a rarity. The 1,500 acres of wetland and associated upland that make up the Park lie within just a few miles of our Nation’s Capital. Green space at the urban fringe. Presidents and Congressman have flown above it as long as they have flown. And some, perhaps, have walked Her trails. The boardwalk at Huntley is frequented by every manner of person. Every age, every culture. Children grow up there. Adults reconnect with their inner child. Dreams are dreamed. Blessings are counted. Huntley Meadows is where people go to look deep within their souls and to be a part of something greater than themselves. Even if that’s not the intent, it’s the outcome. A single duck or a muskrat or a butterfly has the power to make it so. As our landscapes are increasingly urbanized and fragmented by suburban lawns, places like Huntley Meadows Park grow in value—not only because they become refuges for wildlife, but because they are refugia for the wildness in each one of us. We must save a place for the Wild both within and outside ourselves. Go into the green spaces of your life. Value and protect them. Grow them. Let them become the sacred places of humanity where humans are. . . and our future is defined. — Excerpt from Preface
Songs from a Wild Place Jason Kirkey
Price: $14.95 6×9 Paperback, 116 pages ISBN: 978-0979924644 Distributed by Ingrams
Songs from a Wild Place is Jason Kirkey’s second volume of poetry. Its motifs range from self-transformation, quiet revelations found in the natural world, love, and the re-imagination of culture and spirit. In all cases this poetry emerges out of a conversation with the world at the edge of individual identity. It is a book about finding the authentic voice and using it to create transformation in both the human and other-thanhuman worlds.
40% Discount offered to bookstores when purchased through publisher
The Ballad of the Sea-Sweet Moon and Other Poems Jason Kirkey
Price: $12.95 5×8 Paperback, 104 pages ISBN: 978-0979924620 Distributed by Ingrams
The Ballad of the Sea-Sweet Moon tells the story of a mythic encounter with the divine feminine and how it shakes and shapes the life of one man, setting his heart ablaze. In their poetic and tantric love-making, cities and structures of consciousness will fall, ultimately making room for a new way of being in the world. This collection also includes a newly edited version of the chapbook September Seeing and several never before seen poems.
40% Discount offered to bookstores when purchased through publisher
Courting the Wild: Love Affairs with Reptiles and Amphibians Edited by Jamie K. Reaser
with a foreword by Thomas E. Lovejoy Price: $12.95 5×8 Paperback, 252 pages ISBN: 978-0979924651 Distributed by Ingrams
“This wonderful collection of essays offers a glimpse into the special world of reptiles, and the spell they cast on those who have devoted their lives to their study. If you love nature, whether or not you’re “into” reptiles, you’ll find much to enjoy, and you just may come away with a newfound appreciation and respect for these fascinating, often beautiful and frequently misunderstood creatures.” ~Russ Case, editor, REPTILES magazine, ReptileChannel.com
40% Discount offered to bookstores when purchased through publisher
Courting the Wild: Love Affairs with the Land Edited by Jamie K. Reaser and Susan Chernak McElroy Price: $12.95 5×8 Paperback, 160 pages ISBN: 978-0979924637 Distributed by Ingrams
Do you remember the first time you fell in love? Within these pages you will find love stories, rapturous love affairs with the land, shameless seductions, betrothals, vows exchanged, marriages of the soul, heartaches, partings, healings, and renewals. The authors are the courters and the courted…Their landscape paramours embrace them and they grow forth from within.
40% Discount offered to bookstores when purchased through publisher
W
ith each Hiraeth Press book you add to your home library
you lend support to the philosophy for which the press stands, joining us in our philanthropic endeavors and helping to keep our honorable intentions alive. In an effort to reciprocate, we choose to publish titles that will not only provide a relaxing experience for our readers but will act as nourishment for the spirit. As you sustain us, we seek in some small way to sustain you. It is our desire to nourish our readers—offering our books like a rich mulch to bolster the soul and help the mind flower. Now more than ever we mustn’t neglect our well-being. Be gentle with yourself.
N o ur is h y o ur s elf.
Nourish Yourself