Wu Wei: Poems

Crawford's images are spot on; his poetry sympathetic and insightful. In this volume he offers exotic glimpses of the China he met while a poet in residence, as well as poems after his return to the Pacific Northwest. There are some wonderful bird poems, wonderful beach poems here; loving poems of living in the west -- life, death, the big stuff and small, told kindly and with feeling. Crawford is a living master of this genre. He ought to be named a US Poet Laureate.

This is a quiet book of poems that wraps itself around your heart, imagination and intellect. It is written by a poet with his eyes wide open in this world. He sees beauty in the plain, ordinary and sometimes ugly things that we often have no time for. The things that matter! I loved this book.

Wu Wei Poems is a book of poetry brimming with the memory of years spent visiting China, from the sights and smells of local villages to the dancing of street monkeys and a young girl steeling herself to butcher her first chicken. The poems after the author's return home balance Buddhist sentiment and Eastern perspective with the traditional Western cultural grounding, and illustrates the search for grace and transcendence through mundane experience. Though succinct, the poems linger in mind with the palpable tang of bittersweet emotion. Yuan Fen: The worn bowl / we eat from is always home. / I took nothing from China / it didn't want from me. / So, here is my heart / where the Jialing River / joins the great Yangtze. / The world here, / broken and dirty, / feeds me, sings.