Vine of the Soul:
Medicine Men, Their Plants and Rituals in The Colombian Amazonia
by Richard Evans Schultes and Robert Raffauf •
Preface to the second edition by Wade Davis

Vine of the Soul… “is an informed and informative exploration …Vine of the Soul is a core addition to personal, professional, academic, and community library Amazonian Studies reading lists and South American Indian reference collections.”

The Midwest Book Review
Wisconsin Bookwatch & Internet Bookwatch
Feb 2004

“Vine of the Soul is replete with synergism. The inclusion of the preface by Wade Davis, a former student of Dr. Schultes, and a dedication in the fore-material is a welcome addition to the second edition. All writing in the book…complements the scholarship and the incredible photographs, making the whole better than the separate parts. Each segment fits the other like hand and glove, as smoothly as heavy cream pouring from a pitcher.

Synergetic Press is to be commended for publishing Vine of the Soul. It will be useful and appreciated by many at all levels...is a highly recommended book.”

Willard Van Asdall, Retired Professor,
University of Arizona
Former Editor, Journal of Ethnobiology

"Even to look at the book’s cover…conjures up, well, another world! The giant Ayahuasca vine hanging the length of the Great Tree…with the deepgreen rainforest jungle as backdrop, teeming with…dangers and delights! Adventures! Unpredictabilities! Nothing ever standing still! Surprises teeming around every corner. Vine of the Soul contains some of the most significant photographs on this subject ever taken plus detailed descriptions of the use of plant substances,
with information on their bioactive chemistry. This is a book you’ll go back to throughout your life.”

Fraser Clark, UP Magazine, Parallel University

Ayahuasca Reader
Encounters with the Amazon's Sacred Vine
Edited by Luis Eduardo Luna & Steven F. White

White Gold
The Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon 1906-1916
by John C. Yungjohann
edited by Sir Ghillean T. Prance
Former Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England

"Readers of this journal will find this first hand account fascinating and will appreciate the efforts of a work wearyrubber cutter to not only survive the experience but to write about it."

Journal of Ethnobiology

"How fortunate that the diary of the American youth John Yungjohann has come to light and that the famous botanist Dr Ghillean Prance, with years of experience in the Amazon, has so understandably edited it."

"It is thoroughly pleasing, easy reading, and would make a good supplement to a high school or college course that deals with economic plants or the Amazon ... Plan on reading it in one sitting."

George K. Rogers, Missouri Botanical Garden

"White Gold...sets forth the depravity of ruthless men who stop at nothing to exploit their fellows, heedless of their sufferings and deaths in the unfamiliar jungle environment where they hoped to earn a living. How fortunate that the diary of the American youth John Yungjohann has come to light and that the famous botanist Dr. Ghillean Prance, with years of experience, in the Amazon, has so understandably edited it."

Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, Director (Emeritus), Harvard Botanical Museum

"The same life and death dramas are being played out today throughout the Amazon Valley where rubber is one of the important native species being utilized by local people. I highly recommend this work to students of the botany, history and anthropology of this important plant and interesting period in Amazonian history."

Dr. Michael J. Balick, Philecology Curator of Economic Botany, NY Botanical Grd, Inst. of Economic Botany

WHERE THE GODS REIGN
Plants and Peoples of the Colombian Amazon
by Richard Evans Schultes Director of the Botanical Museum (Emeritus), Harvard University

"Richard Schultes is a true ethnobotanist, the incarnation and almost the inventor of this discipline ... Where the Gods Reign is a picture book, ... of great beauty and tranquillity ... full of fascinating information."

Sir John Hemming, Times Literary Supplement

"Where the Gods Reign is a magnificent book by one of the greatest Amazon explorers of this century -- a must for the library of any Amazon oriented person."

Sir Ghillean Prance, Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.

"The numerous photographs are at once spectacular, beautiful, fascinating, and of excellent quality ... It is likely that only Professor Schultes has had or ever will have the resources to produce such ... a remarkable book."

Willard Van Adsall, Journal of Ethnobiology

Feng-Shui
The Science of Sacred Landscape in Old China
By Ernest J. Eitel
with commentary by John Michell

"This well known word means wind-water, but its wider sense stands for the relations to the surrounding nature, the influence of the landscape on the beauty of the buildings and the happiness of the inhabitants."

Ernst Borschman

"The art of living in harmony with the land, and deriving the greatest benefit, peace and prosperity from being in the right place at the right time is called feng-shui."

Stephen Skinner

"Every place has its special topographical features which modifies the local influence of the various ch'i energies) of nature".

Joseph Needham

" ... John Michell argues compellingly that feng-shui can truly enable individuals to create more benign circumstances."

Michael Harings, The Laughing Man Magazine

"Feng-Shui offers a principled but highly flexible code which can be referred to over-all matters of architectural design, city planniong and the use of the countryside."

John Michell

Geochemistry and The Biosphere: Essays By Vladimir I. Vernadsky

by Vladimir Vernadsky
Translated by Olga Barash

Geochemistry and The Biosphere: Essays by Vladimir I. Vernadsky
Synergetic Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico 2007
By Jose Arguelles, Ph.D.

The publication of Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s, “Essays on Geochemistry,” including a translation of the third Russian edition of his classic, “The Biosphere,” is a most welcome effort to enlarge our understanding through giving us a genuinely integrative and holistic perception of our role in the processes of the natural order and in the evolutionary scheme of things.

This first English translation of Vernadsky’s comprehensive study is very lucid, and translator Olga Barash is to be highly commended for it. Reading the “Essays on Geochemistry” is like entering into a prolonged meditation on the chemical interactions of the Earth’s crust, including the relation of the biosphere’s living matter to inert matter. In fact, the perspective Vernadsky provides is often startlingly fresh. Even those not initiated into the intricacies of chemistry will find many points of reflection, not the least of them being the consideration of life as living matter.

As Vernadsky points out, this living matter, so vital in the effects it creates through its dynamic of chemical cycles involving the inert order of reality, accounts for only .1% of the mass of the Earth’s crust. Yet, the entirety of the appearance of the surface of the Earth is due to the wondrous chemical transformations of this minute mass.

Even more wondrous then, is to consider how much of that mass of living matter is accounted for the totality of the human population. Scarcely more than .1% of that (.1%!). And yet, through the application of its thinking process to produce a machine technology and the creation of the technosphere, that human component has irrevocably altered the Earth’s biosphere and provoked a planetary mutation geologically epic in scale.

That the third edition of “The Biosphere” concludes with a set of 13 expanded postulates on the Noosphere allows us to take in the spectrum of Vernadsky’s thought: from Earth’s geochemistry to the consideration of living matter and the creation of the biosphere, to the alterations introduced by the human species to the biosphere, and finally to the noosphere, the consequence, in a geological and evolutionary sense, of the human impact on the natural order.

While many westerners may be aware of the noosphere as a result of the popularity of the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, very few know that Vernadsky and de Chardin were acquainted in Paris in 1926, when, through the lesser known philosopher, Jules le Roy, they were simultaneously exposed to the term noosphere. This was a word Jules le Roy coined to describe the thinking element introduced by the human species into the whole evolutionary equation. As Vernadsky puts it,

“Mankind’s power is not connected with its matter, but with its brain and its work guided by its mind. In the geological history of the biosphere, a great future is opened to Man if he realizes it and does not direct his mind and work to self-destruction …”

“Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a powerful geological force. Humanity’s mind and work face the problem of reconstructing the biosphere in the interests of freely thinking mankind as a single entity. This new state of the biosphere that we are approaching without noticing it is the ‘Noosphere.’” (p.414)

These are important points to reflect and give us a greater perspective on what is going in our world today. As we now see and feel the effects of human thought on the environment in the form of global warming, and continually bear witness to humanity’s tendency toward self-destruction, to consider that we are actually bringing about the noosphere is both a comfort and a cause for the upleveling of our minds. Vernadsky concludes in a reflection that seems even more appropriate now than when he wrote these words at the end of the Second World War:

“Now we are going through a new geological evolutionary change of the biosphere. We are entering the noosphere. We are entering this new spontaneous process at a terrible time, at the end of a destructive world war. But the important thing for us is the fact that the ideals of our democracy correspond to a spontaneous geological process, to natural laws – the noosphere. So we can look at the future with confidence. It is in our hands. We shall not let it go.” (p. 417)

Vernadsky’s profundity of thought is a much needed resource in understanding ourselves as integral components of the natural order. We should be very thankful for this excellent translation of his essays in Geochemistry and The Biosphere. By reading and studying these texts well, we will be able to consider even better how we can participate in more spontaneous, creative and harmonious ways to bring about the noosphere.

Jose Arguelles, Ph.D.
Director of Research
Galactic Research Institute
NS1.19.8.16
Gregorian: February 22, 2007
New Zealand

Vernadsky and his Biosphere
Review by William Jones

Life Under Glass 
The Inside Story of Biosphere 2
by original crew members
Abigail Alling, Mark Nelson, and Sally Silverstone

"Your book depicting the day-to-day life is lively reading and should become a best seller."

Eugene Odum

"We have to pay tribute to the imagination and determination and the vision of the people who have made this project a reality."

Jane Goodall

I do not believe there is more ecoliteracy to be found in a single book, anywhere ever...the idea, the execution, and the reportage...top top..."

Ralph Abraham

"This project probably pioneered the transformation of ecology into an experimental science, while the crew has survived a unique social experiment: the longest voluntary tenure in a confined environment on record."

USA Today

"Your book depicting the day-to-day life is lively reading and should become a best seller."

Eugene Odum

THE RENAISSANCE OF TIBETAN CIVILIZATION
by Professor Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf
Foreword by the Dalai Lama, Essay on Bön by Per Kverne

"...a sympathetic and thorough study of the social forces and unflagging determination which have enabled Tibetan refugees to maintain their national identity, rebuild their communities and re-establish their culture...in exile following the tragedy that has taken place in their homeland."

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

"From the pen of a distinguished anthropologist, this work begins to fill a major gap in our knowledge about Tibetan civilization in the Indo-Nepal diaspora. Considering that the Tibetan question is still far from settled, it is important that people become better informed about the trials and successes of this model refugee community. I warmly recommend the work."

Robert A.F. Thurman,
Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies
Columbia University

COLLECTED WORKS OF THE CARAVAN OF DREAMS
Vol.1

"(Caravan's production of) 'GILGAMESH' is a creation true to the original: a whole cosmos of gods, mystics, magic and humans motivated by love and fear of death."

Pieter Kottman, NCR Handelsblad, Amsterdam

"MAROUF THE COBBLER" is a rich dramatic tribute to a couple who knew and practised the art of all possibilities: the Lady Sheheraxade and her most faithful interpreter, Sir Richard Burton. Strongly recommended to those who enjoy 'all solace of life and its delight."

Muhtar Holland al-Hajj, Director
Nur al-Islam Translation Center, New York

"These plays are possessed of strange oriental powers. Two are set in Asia and "FAUST", though European, is no less hypnotic...dramas with rich and varied possibilities-quite marvellous."

Reginald Massey, Asian Post, London

COLLECTED WORKS OF THE CARAVAN OF DREAMS
Vol.2

"A modern American version of the Noh pieces of Japan and the ancient Indian Natya, combining words and highly stylized dance movements to say things beyond the reach of normal acting."

Fernau Hall, London Daily Telgraph

"Succeeds in following Artaud's prescriptions for `total theater'. There is nothing psychological about its characters and the action is liberating anarchy. They intentionally present too much to look at and think about. It jars spectators out of passivity: inviting them to participate in the discovery of possibilities."

Jill Dolan, The Villager

"Marouf the Cobbler is a rich dramatic tribute to a couple who knew and practised the art of all possibilities: the Lady Shehrazade and her most faithful interpreter, Sir Richard Burton. Strongly recommended to those who enjoy 'all solace of life and its delight."

Muhtar Holland al-Hajj, Director of Nur al-Islam Translation Center, New York

"These plays are possessed of strange Oriental powers. Two are set in Asia and `Faust', though European, is no less hypnotic ...dramas with rich and varied possibilties -- quite marvelous."

Reginald Massey, Asian Post, London

GERALDE WILDE 1905-1986
Edited by Chili Hawes, Director, The October Gallery, London

"Many now consider [Wilde] the outstanding painter of his generation (Sutherland, Piper) in England, and the only abstract expressionist produced."

John McEwen, Art in America, New York

"The trapped in all of us can respond to these works because they strive for all release, and in our recognition of this and of the loneliness and suffering involved, we think -- however rashly -- of the word genius."

John Berger, The New Statesman and Nation

PERILOUS PASSAGE
The Nervous System & the Universe in other Words

by Terry Wilson

This book finalises Wilson's Green Base Trilogy which commenced with Dreams of a Green Base (1986) and "D" Train (1985). Perilous Passage finishes in exuberant style with a committed attack on our fatal faith in 'reality'. His other book, Here to Go, is a classic book of interviews with Brion Gysin documenting the life, work and philosophy of this brilliant avant-garde figure.

"There are merciless, beautiful and crystallized (in the Stendhal sense) insights that will make this book part of the canon of Tangier and indeed, the avant-garde of that perilous and amazing time of which the Third Mind may rank as its greatest achievement. Terry's work will prove of great value to many an adventurer exploring the edges and beyond."

Johnny Dolphin

"As past, present, future, dreams and waking moments intermesh, Terry Wilson's enquiry into the Process seeps in through the pores."

Corinna MacNeice

"...Wilson's writing is shot through with passages of yearning and beauty in which he breaks through into a new domain: the description of states of altered consciousness which are sometimes thought to be beyond words. Wilson derides language only to catch it by its tail and set it on a fresh course...his work challenges our notions of what we believe to be real and what we refuse to accept as remotely possible.

Wilson's approach is a world away from recent critical studies and biographies of Gysin and Burroughs. Perilous Passage is the spiritual expression of a practitioner of Third Mind techniques, rather than an intellectual appraisal or the homage of a fan."

Ian MacFadyen, The London Magazine, Dec/Jan 2006

Ian MacFadyen's in-depth essay on Perilous Passage (Pdf)

LIBERATED SPACE
Book three in the trilogy which takes place around the planet in the Sixties
by Johnny Dolphin

"It's been said that anyone who remembers the 60's probably wasn't there. Johnny Dolphin was there. And he remembers the time with such accuracy that I can almost smell the bad pot, cat piss, and patchouli oil. He reminds as well of the human marvels, the mysterious beings who appeared among us during our brief liberty."

John Perry Barlow

Co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation

" I'm still reading Liberated Space, wherein I find fragments of pulsating, resonating truths so great and so concise that I gasp. Here's one:

"I saw how ecstasy can be composed like poetry, or a painting or music and that this art, produced for oneself, unreproduceable for others to see, was the supreme art from whose bounty all other arts gained their courage and force to manifest. This supreme art served as the irrefutable assessment of the achievement of all other arts."

I am enjoying this book very much. It's an experience. By association I'm reminded of Harold Bloom, an academic who is credited, priest like, with having established the 'canon' of western literary classics. To Bloom is attributed the condition he dubbed, 'the anxiety of influence', essentially the fear of possession by another's style. Well, I can think of no other writer I'd rather be invested in than with Johnny Dolphin. Nothing personal, you understand...he's just All On."

Maria Golia

Author, Cairo, Egypt

JOURNEY AROUND AN EXTRAORDINARY PLANET
Book two in the trilogy which takes place around the planet in the Sixties
by Johnny Dolphin

"I recommend this book, this journey and this journal, to all seeker-readers, especially the thinkers among them. It gives good hints on how to go and is a good adventure story and a worthy addition to the 'Pilgrim's Progress' genre, of such importance in world literature".

Kaviraj George Dowden

"The idea of war seized my mind. How could anyone understand history without direct experience of war?"

Johnny Dolphin

39 BLOWS ON A GONE TRUMPET
Book one in the trilogy which takes place around the planet in the Sixties
by Johnny Dolphin

Appealing ... witty/tough nice/neat ...

City Limits, London

MY MANY KISSES
and Other Short Stories
by Johnny Dolphin

"Borges with a sense of humor!"

Maria Golia, Cairo Times

"The most engaging collection of short stories to appear in a decade, "My Many Kisses" firmly establishes Johnny Dolphin as one of America's foremost authors, writing in a style that is uniquely his own.

A born storyteller, Dolphin is fascinated by people and life, and transmits that fascination with the magical powers of a modern Herodotus. Like Herodotus, he never forgets that events and narrative may occasionally edify, should probably educate but must always entertain. And Entertain they do.

In this adroitly crafted volume of Short Stories, we are introduced to a wide-range of intriguing and provocative people, anyone of whom provides new meaning to to the expression "cool character."

From 'Gerard Manley' in 1969 San Francisco('The Man Who Loved Emotions'); to 1985 "Seeker of Reality" 'Ted Slater,' Author Johnny Dolphin beguiles us effortlessly. A terrific storyteller, Dolphin's observations and descriptive powers draws the reader into the tale, however 'foreign.'

A most rewarding journey, "My Many Kisses" travels oceans of time and circumstance, the author's intellectualism and wisdom on display throughout. It is easy to imagine any one of these twenty, engrossing stories, expanded into a Novel or a Film. (Dolphin would be a terrific guest on the 'Talk-Show' circuit.)

With the publication of "My Many Kisses" Johnny Dolphin has joined the ranks of (his friends) William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Like them, Johnny Dolphin was a significant participant in-- but a far better reporter/observer of-- events beginning in the 1960s that would impact and shape society. And not only in the United States.

In "My Many Kisses," Johnny Dolphin continues to unfurl his precise and piercing observations with us, and we, dear readers, are richer for them.

Buy it, read it, then read it again".

ecodoc, Amazon reader review

"...the author recreates the authentic mood and the tone of the time he describes. There's an amazing energy that rises right off of the pages...a series of mini-biographies...-a Southern woman who ends up running a restaurant with a Moslem family in the south of France; a visionary mine owner who is murdered by figures representing the industrial-military complex; a German lady who runs a hotel in Tibet."

Georgia Jones-Davis
Southwest Book Views, Vol.3 No.1, Winter 2004

"What a delightful joy to read the short stories of Johnny Dolphin. "My Many Kisses" is loaded with surprises, which is what a fine author should provide the reader, and Mr. Dolphin does. (I so related to Maud in 'An Actress from Brooklyn.)

Johnny Dolphin is a writer who really knows - and understands - women. I nominate him for an honorary membership in NOW.

And "My Many Kisses" should be mandatory reading in Social Studies classes everywhere."

Reader, Portland, Oregon
Amazon Customer review, June 24, 2001

"Author Johnny Dolphin...leads us on a narrative route that is a joy to travel - the road (roads) we all secretly wish we might have taken. "My Many Kisses" is bold, rigorous...a wonderful read."

Jaie Brashar,
Amazon Customer review, June 24, 2001

OFF THE ROAD
POETRY 1989-2000
by Johnny Dolphin

This Dolphin seems to me a Renaissance Man, excelling in all the arts and science of our time. This, a grander achievement now than four hundred years past when it was easier for all knowledge to be encompassed by one man. I first met him ages ago in a dream about a new world he created on a fantastic dare, a second earth, a paradise. In the mid-nineties I met him in real life at Biosphere Two, his brainchild of breathing acres under glass.

How this most noble and ambitious of experiments was taken over, “Billionaires always win,” brutally wrested from the hands of the original Biospherians is tightly delineated, touchingly told in the longest poem of this collection.

This guy lives life, travels everywhere, does everything and transforms his adventures, his thoughts and dreams into living poetry. This confident voice strikes poems out of bedrock, touchstone, pierces the veil, reveals jeweled gardens, sings the song. A Sultan from The Thousand and One Nights, on hearing such a poet, would command: "Stuff his mouth with pearls.”

This Dolphin, master smith
Carves thru chaff to pith
Hammers matter into myth.

Rosé

"You pack alot of wisdom into one poem."

Ira Cohen

Midwest Book Review, Wisconsin Bookwatch,
May 2001

WILD
Poems, Aphorisms, and short stories
by Johnny Dolphin

"Johnny Dolphin conjures up a universe that is complete and unexpectedly satisfying."

Bruce Connolly, Library Journal

THE DREAM and DRINK of FREEDOM
by Johnny Dolphin

            These poems come from a unique perspective in American life. Johnny Dolphin, like any poet of consequence, has an individuality that is inspiring in contrast to the plodding normality of most people’s dull, enervating routines. What makes Dolphin so special in my book is that his unique perception as a poet, thinker, and dreamer doesn’t distance him from mankind, but leads him to identify more closely with the problems that beset us all. He would impart his vision, in language at once special and also idiomatic, to his people, the Americans, after the spirit of Walt Whitman. As the old camp meeting saying goes, “No one gets to heaven alone.” So Dolphin says, as Whitman did before him, “As I am, you may be also.”
            His dream and drink of freedom is the same original dream that has produced the best inspiration of America. The totem animal for our times is probably the caged beast. Never before have societies east and west had so many men behind bars, or needed to, from the other point of view. Dolphin, like the true shaman, presents us the other image of man as a free beast walking the hills, traipsing the desert slowly, bathing in the creeks and rivers because they are there.
            He has worked in America’s factories; he has studied in America’s universities; he has picked up much in the back rooms and front rooms of juke joints; he is a world traveler; yet he is still unique. In these poems he manifests that original purity of freedom he felt as a child, that “light from the East,” from which Wordsworth says we daily travel away from.
            This is the mark of any poet, that they have learned how to renew those wellsprings of vision and dreaming that are our natural right as children. These poems are various as selected poems should be. These poems haven’t been written from some safe tenure in the ivory tower. They have been written from a life of work, of dreaming, of purpose, of seeking, of finding out those teachers through the course of time who were those that know.
            For anyone to read these poems seriously, quietly, rereading the best ones over several times, will be to enlarge their own lives, to renew their own sense of purpose and seeking out. Some things are better than others. The good, the beautiful, really does exist.
            Some of my favorite poems are Mother, Wall Street, NewYork, Eagle, To______, Bright-Veda, One Song if India, Riff of Bobby Bunsen, After a Life of Action, Dreams, In The Sonoran Desert, and The Americans.
           
            From A Mother,
                                                Why, old mother, must we wither,
                                                Why is it not enough to die?
           
            From Wall Street,
                                                Energy, energy, is what we’ve got to sell;
                                                Why, dam it’s steep up here,
                                                Charge higher the electric thrill,
                                                And cheer the foaming crash.

            From Eagle,
                                                The full moon backed down like an
                                                Old catfish into a flood-caved bank;

            Bright-Veda,
                                                Sun is bright
                                                Bright the stars
                                                Bright and hot is fire
                                                Bright is eye
                                                And bright the diamond
                                                Dew is bright
                                                And lightning
                                                And waterfall are bright
                                                And lamps and neon
                                                And polished steel are bright
                                                And bright the axe sound
                                                Over frozen snow.

The last sudden image is a true satori, leading one into the conceptual depths of bright, the oldest Indo-European root for being; the being brought by the bringer being equally bright whether sight or sound. Here we have the poet’s ear as well as the poet’s conception. This reminds me of Pindar’s “What are we, what are we not? The shadow of a day is man, no more, but when the brightness comes, and Zeus gives it, there is a shining of light on man and his life is sweet.”
           
            From After A Life of Action

                                                Poetry can be lost but never destroyed
                                                In the ecology of man poetry is the indicator species
                                                Of the health of the dream

            I deeply admire Dolphin’s poem, The Americans, subtitled or dedicated “To the policies of openness in Russia and China.” Dolphin knows this is one world, that America has a lot to give the world, that we are hungry to give our rich gifts. If poetry can help bridge the age-old gaps, can help engender the merest search for understanding of ourselves and others, this poetry will do it.
            One last note in this all too brief review. Dolphin knows that our earth is a biosphere; that there are great mysteries being divulged by the earth our mother beneath our feet, great mysteries still swarming in the fecund oceans (hence his pen-name), and even more important, much to be gathered in our reach out towards the heavens, the stars, the planets, the ocean of air that girdles our blue globe. Dolphin is not afraid to swim in these far reaches; he senses it is our destiny. He is unafraid to listen for these “voices in the upper air,” the “order of angels” that inspired Rilke. In that he is indisputably still American, still the true son of Walt Whitman. These are rough-hewn poems, but sink even deeper into the memory for all their roughness, like the bite of “the axe sound/over frozen snow.”

Paul Foreman, Austin, Texas

POETRAITS
by Rosé

"Rosé accomplishes the nearly impossible feat of bringing rhymed, metrical poetry to the contemporary sensibility. His poetry is dry, spare, very funny, and aware of the difficulty of living in these times. His is a stoic's acceptance of the unacceptable and a comedian's surprise at the endless pecadillos of post-industrial society."  

Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm

"A rare opportunity awaits the reader in this tango of language as moving and as graceful as the dance of that name. Here for the engaging mind are poetic utterances from an American unknown master of the word. His subjects are the illusive ordinary. In the mind's eye of humor, transliterated and perfumed in the beauty of language, he renders the ordinary profound."

Godfrey Reggio

Rosé, a unique bardic rhapsode, a real commedia dell'arte improviser of rhymed stanzas whether serious, satirical or playful. 

Charles G. Bell

ON FEET OF GOLD
by Ira Cohen

"Reading your poems is like smoking raw nerves."

Henri Michaux

"... the scope and power of On Feet of Gold put Ira Cohen at the forefront of American poets today."

Uri Hertz, Poetry Flash

"Exterior and interior merge, weave notions of meaning, point out our societal demarcations, and then take on the act of actual living as a continuous celebration without mincing words or trivializing human experience."

Ricardo Sanchez, Lively Arts, Texas

UNCOMMON QUOTES
by Johnny Dolphin
Audio

Over the course of 40 short poems from The Dream & Drink of Freedom. Johnny Dolphin conjures up a universe that is complete and unexpectedly satisfying. "Unexpectedly" because the cumulative effect of his work is what most impresses the listener, who may well require repeated listenings to allow a full appreciaten of the poets efforts to develop. With weariness but deep passion, Dolphin contemplates the gutter and galaxies, the mundane and the mystical.

Bruce Connelly, Library Journal

POETRY LONDON/APPLE MAGAZINE
Editions Poetry London

edited by Tambimuttu

"It is only in Poetry London that I can consistently expect to find new poets who matter."

T.S. Eliot

"...the book achieves the rare feat of sign-posting the significance of past experiments, while allowing some space to those of the present."

Time Out, London

Sebastian Barker, Editor, London Magazine
A Tribute to Tambimuttu (1915-1983)
The October Gallery Friday 5th November 2004

I have been asked by the people who run the October Gallery to pay a ten minute tribute to Tambimuttu, who was one of the founding spirits at the Gallery's beginning 25 years ago.

Paying tribute to Tambimuttu is as hopeless a task as paying tribute to a legend. This is because his story stretches from the late 1930s to the early 1980s and includes hundreds of people distinguished in literature and the arts. A simple roll-call of their names would take longer than my time allows, so instead of mentioning them all, I will draw a picture of the man I knew.

James Meary Tambimuttu arrived in London from Sri Lanka in 1938. Virtually penniless and in his early twenties, he founded Poetry London, a bi-monthly which was to become, in the words of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 'the leading poetry magazine of the 1940s'. Tambi made himself at home in Soho – and Fitzrovia, the area just to the north of Oxford Street. He was proud to have coined the term 'Fitzrovia', after the Fitzroy Tavern on the corner of Charlotte Street. I know because he once delighted in pointing out the word to me in a dictionary, justly claiming it as his own.

T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Lawrence Durrell, and George Orwell were early supporters of Tambi. T.S. Eliot said, 'It is only in Poetry London that I can consistently expect to find new poets who matter.' This uncanny capacity for nosing out talent was Tambi's hallmark. By the time he left for New York in 1949, he was a household name in the kitchens of the artistic.

In New York, he set up an American version of his magazine, calling it Poetry London-New York. He operated from Greenwich Village (where else?) and attracted people like Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, and Dr Timothy Leary. This last name is interesting, because it shows how Tambi was open to new energy in a way which I still find amazing.

Tambi came into my life, as it were, before I was even born. This was through his powerful friendships with my parents, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart, both of whom he published. The fact that he published my mother's book By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept (with a cover by Gerald Wilde) in 1945, the year I was born, even now stands out as historically prescient. The book was republished in paperback 21 years later in 1966; and went on to become a classic. His publication in 1943 of the great religious poetry of David Gascoyne is along the same lines. This was in Poems 1937-1942 illustrated by Graham Sutherland. Many other examples like these could be put forward.

This ability to respond to new energy in a positive way was perhaps at its most astonishing in relation to Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. After experimenting with psychoactive substances from the Amazonian rain forests, these two were to introduce the phrase 'Peace & Love' as the fragile political philosophy of the spiritual resurgence of the 1960s. Timothy Leary had announced 'Turn on, tune in, drop out' to an entire generation (my own), but it was Ginsberg and Burroughs who gave him the courage to do so.

Tambi was one of the key figures in this hallucinogenic awakening. This was because of his friendships with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Leary. Leary had produced The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1964; as well as Psychedelic Prayers: After the Tao Te Ching in 1966. These were instruction manuals, based on two oriental texts, for the exploration of the sacred. Naturally, for an oriental editor like Tambi, they were right up his street.

Psychedelic Prayers is dedicated to Aurora and William Hitchcock. They were well-to-do, enlightened Americans living in Millbrook in the state of New York. This was the base from which Leary operated in 1966. It was to this base, too, that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters – including Neal Cassidy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road – made their way in their psychedelic bus, as so brilliantly described by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Tim Leary was high church, it was said, Ken Kesey was low church. But, as we might have guessed, Tambi was broad church. And where had Tambi taken himself? To Aurora and William Hitchcock's Millbrook estate, of course, for that is where the action was.

It was from Millbrook that Tambi left America to come back to England. And it was soon after his departure that I found him in 1968 in my mother's garden in Suffolk walking around barefoot with a jeroboam of red wine swinging from his little finger. He was in the middle of a party with her, which had clearly been going on for a week. It would have been impolite not to have joined in, which was how I came to meet him. And to know him was to love him.

My father called him 'India Rubber', because of his ability to bounce back. So it came as no surprise to learn that Poetry London was to be reborn, this time as Poetry London / Apple Magazine, after Tambi's inevitable friendship with the Beatles and their Apple organisation.

It was in fact ten years later, in Autumn 1979, that the magazine surfaced, with a cover by Graham Sutherland and a plastic disc of 'Plutonium Ode' by Allen Ginsberg tucked in at the back. I remember the time well, because I was one of Tambi's associate editors. What a party he threw to launch the issue! It was at a mighty fine place in Mayfair (the National Book League). Ginsberg had flown in to read his ode. I saw Tambi and Iris Murdoch, who had contributed five poems, entranced together. The place was seething with talent and good will. Tambi was on top of the world again.

It was at this time that he called me round to the newly-opened October Gallery to meet Kathelin Grey and the troop of the Theater of All Possibilities, who were part of the Gallery. The Gallery was special indeed, an evolution of the 60s into the 80s under the wise governance of John Allen, also known, rightly, as the dolphin; and the wonderful dignity of the day-to-day director Chili Hawes. Tambi was carried away by the spirit of the Gallery and it soon became an extension of his flat in Gloucester Road.

Just how much he loved it may be judged by one anecdote, which I witnessed. Down at heel as usual, with £4 to his name in the world, I had driven him from Gloucester Road to the Gallery. A phone message came through that a cheque for him for £500 was on its way for some work he'd done in the past. There was celebration all round. Then the news came through, all at once, that the Theater of All Possibilities was in urgent need of money. Without a murmur, Tambi made over the £500 to the Theatre. Because he didn't want to waste any of his £4 on the tube, I drove him back to Gloucester Road, where he spent the £4 on beer and sandwiches for himself, his girl-friend Jane Williams, and myself. Such an action was typical of him. His was the grace under pressure of a man of courage.

He produced another stunning number of Poetry London / Apple Magazine in 1982. This issue had its editorial address at the October Gallery. I remember helping to move his office into the place in 1979, carefully transporting his precious Poetry London logos and trays of lead type from the back of my van, a white Citroën Ami 8. He loved this van because he enjoyed the double-bed in the back and the stereo sound system. But that's another story.

When he died in 1983, by falling down the stairs to his flat in Gloucester Road, a spirit of magic and delight went out of the world. He was a chip off the old block. The Uncarved Block of the Tao Te Ching.