The Calling
Tom Absher
"There is in this collection a real affection for the world and a wisdom in Absher's contemplation of the beings who inhabit it. His love is an examined love, and so we have the pleasure of listening to his mind and to his heart. The clarity of the writing and the complexity of Absher's world-view result in a poetry of intelligence and power. I was moved by the beautiful moral tone of these poems."
—John Skoyles
"Tom Absher's poems are the fruit of an impassioned holding still, one in which the most delicate of recognitions of self and other are revealed in the interstices of experience, where they are most easily missed. He has clearly practiced the art of attending, of listening deep into the night, long past the moment when the last nightbird falls silent, to that moment when the ears are "ringing with the quiet." The move toward emptiness and simplicity that is the essence of Absher's poetic discipline is taken up in his verse, a corpus deceptive in its accessibility. Yet his text demands, for its full appreciation, that the reader put all six senses on alert, in order to commune with the spirits his verse has summoned, in order to bear homage, with him, to the fragile treasures of a world otherwise so recklessly misprized."
—Ruth El Saffar
about the author
Tom Absher was born in Kansas and spent most of his childhood in Texas. He is the author of three books of poetry: Forms of Praise (Ohio State University Press, 1981), The Calling (1987), and The Invisible Boy (The Writer’s Voice,1998), as well as a book of essays on ten literary classics entitled Men and the Goddess (Inner Traditions, 1990). He teaches literature and writing in the Adult Degree Program at Vermont College of Norwich University.
