If you read The Paris Review; if you listen to NPR; if Tom Robbins makes your head spin while your heart sinks because, face it, you'll never make woo-woo magic with words the way he does; if Keats, Yeats, Joyce, or maybe T.S Eliot is a favorite, you'll particularly love this year's Savant Poetry Anthology, VOLUTIONS.



Another way of saying this, is if you have ever loved anyone, anything or any place so rightly or so wrongly that it hurt, hated (yes, hated) injustice, or thought poetry ought to intersect with readers' experience (like, say they'll smile out loud in recognition, weep, or maybe lose their breath in wonder, or rage), then these poems are for you.

A word about the name of the 2014 Poetry Anthology (our fifth in this multi-award-winning series): A volution is a motion, a whirling, a single turning, or a spiraling found in nature or the lives of human beings. VOLUTIONS, the anthology, is divided into sections that describe five possible stages of a human "volution."

The first section, La Magia Della Spirale (the magic of the spiral) is where you'll find poems of beginnings, probing the pulse and hunger, burnt fat, saliva and salt. Blood diluted so that its hues range from peach to midnight blue. Melodies from the beards of waves.

The poems in Merry Go Sorry Go Round, the next section, like memories of childhood or coming of age, evoke both joy and sorrow at the same time. Here you'll find souls unsheathed, mommy drinking up the gin, an orchid of fig trees, eight year-old cartographers, grandmother's dance songs, children's nightmares, and autumn lullabies.

A diapason provides a directional compass for a musical instrument or the voice. As adults, we struggle to find our way in life. Among the poems in Diapasons, the third section, you will sing the moods of water, beg for taboo ciphers and open ground and billowy, sometimes unbearable dreams. Some poems will invite you to go home, or not; rip at the undulating carpet, como un seaweed (as a seaweed). Some will introduce you to the worms that stir, as they have for decades, within the preacher, choir, incomplete. Others will show you an abrupt end to life's sleight of hand suggesting that no te ofrecen riquezas (you aren't as rich as you might think) and yet, richer than your wildest imaginations. Have you bent over the railing, with her …or helpless reactivity?

Bells of Quietus follows.  These poems face dying, death, release and acceptance. A sacred pond at the bottom of a crater, a threadbare sweater, a lonely end; rock, scissors, paper; the coldest night in twenty-seven years; a doomed departure despite artfully graced flowers, oil-blessed dust and warm music…the last step of the last journey of acceptance.

Coming full circle, you'll encounter, Spiral Arms, like those in the galaxies, a repository for poems of resurgence. These works sing of the phoenix, the newborn's rapid pulse, reawakening, joyous spring and trust.

As the editor of VOLUTIONS -- 2014 Savant Poetry Anthology, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce and wholeheartedly recommend all thirty-seven exceptional poems by this year's fourteen outstanding poets including Noemi Villagrana Barragan, Elsha Bohnert, Hans Brinckmann, Helen R. Davis, K. Lauren de Boer, Duandino, Lonner F. Holden, Daniel S. Janik, Kaethe Kauffman, Suzanne Langford, Lucretia Leong, C. P. Little, Leilani Madison and Lady Mariposa.

Sincerely,
Suzanne Langford
Editor of VOLUTIONS -- 2014 Savant Poetry Anthology