Publisher's Synopsis
This is the second book from Camp Pope Publishing, featuring the poetry of Joe Kyugen Michaud and the photographs of Steve Bartelt. Joe is associated with the Iowa City Soto Zen Center and Steve is a member of the Midwest Soto Zen Community out of Madison, Wisconsin. They authored and illustrated a previous book, namely, Mindscapes: Selected Poems of the Way in 2015. Joe has been writing "prairie poetry" since he moved to Iowa in 1972. Prairie Wind: Prairie Poems with a Zen Flavor consists of poems that arise from his nature experience mainly of eastern Iowa, with an occasional lapse of homesickness for his home state of Maine. In his introduction, Joe tells us that the purpose of a Zen nature poem is to transmit to the reader the essence of his aesthetic and or spiritual experience of nature. Steve would agree that this is also the purpose of a Zen approach to photography. In both cases, it is the meditation-cleansed windows of perception that seek to portray the silence and wholeness that permeate the natural world, in an experience called "suchness" which non-meditators may know as "aesthetic arrest." See the prairie with fresh eyes. Read and enjoy.
