Through his sensibilities we touch what is human: Brilliant, profound and accessible, the poems in this collection are like precious treasures rising from the deep, glistening reminders of what really matters.
This is a book worth owning and keeping and visiting and revisiting. Now in his sixties, he is publishing Reduced to Joy, a book of seventy-three poems, retrieved and shaped over the last thirteen years, about the nature of working with what we're given till it wears us through to joy. About joy, Nepo says, "Often, what keeps us from joy is the menacing assumption that life is happening other than where we are.
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It's where I always go to listen, always stunned by what arrives. It's how I know the inner world. I bring these poems back from the deep like shells from the sea that we can look at together. When just a pup, I took her into winter. While Paul photographed the heavy snow, she, having never run free, circled wildly, her little nose caked with white. She slipped and broke the ice. I can still see her puppy face underwater, looking for a way out, her tiny paws swatting at the thick clear deep. With no thought, I was waist high and wet, sweeping her into the air.
She flew a good twelve feet and landed with a thud. She shook and started to shiver. We rubbed her down for two hours, blowing her with an old hair dryer. I held her in my shirt, near my heart, the whole way home. How much that day has shaped my art: As if my life depends on it. As the wind makes a different song through the same tree as its branches break, God makes finer and finer music through the wearing down of our will.
It's as if what is unbreakable— the very pulse of life—waits for everything else to be torn away, and then in the bareness that only silence and suffering and great love can expose, it dares to speak through us and to us. It seems to say, if you want to last, hold on to nothing.
If you want to know love, let in everything. If you want to feel the presence of everything, stop counting the things that break along the way. Mark Nepo will make you fall in love with the world. Allow them to reach under your skin, to where mystery is born into meaning. What a marvelous book. Mark Nepo's generous, vast poems restore readers to joy even before we finish reading them—musing upon single lines, images, stanzas—we feel it rising up again, that precious sense of YES.
And completing them—we feel the rich trove of thinking and living so heartened and restored. If you already know Mark's work, you won't want to miss this collection. And if you have never had the pleasure of experiencing the world through Mark Nepo's eyes, begin with Reduced to Joy.
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By showing us again and again what happens when one man is "completely at peace," we witness what is possible when we are "reduced to joy" by an honest life, and by poetry itself. Mark Nepo's poems transmit those transfiguring experiences inside words of beauty. Nepo's poems should carry a warning label: His new Reduced to Joy cuts close to the bone with passages of pure beauty and raw honesty. I felt the stillness he wrote of, followed by a sense of peace. For this, I am grateful. This is a beautiful book of poems to deepen and nurture the soul with love and joy, even for those who have never read a poem in their life.
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He writes from the wisdom of experience—of having journeyed through two cancers. He gets to the essence of happiness, touching readers with his poetic passages and personal aha moments. He reminds us that in stillness, in embracing the mystery of life, and in embodying our birthright as mighty expressions of love, we are reduced to joy.
His poems inspire, connect, and encourage us to breathe in our own truth so that we can rediscover the peace and joy that is also present in each moment of our lives. Extraordinary Enlightenment for Ordinary People. Nepo is an inveterate meaning-maker who has delved deeply into the wisdom traditions and the world's religions. In vivid imagery, he captures those connections and epiphanies which illuminate the human condition.
What inspired you to write this book? They break surface like dolphin after long stretches of going under. So writing a book of poems for me is different than writing my other books. I have to sit when I'm able and try to make heart-sense of what life has been doing to me and with me.
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Like wringing out a sponge, I squeeze what matters onto the page, let it dry, and see what's there the next day. One by one, they gather into an instructive whole. All this to say, that by trying to make sense of my own experience, I've discovered a theme to the journey, that we are all reduced to joy, worn away of all excess.
To survive this, we often need to hold each other up in order to discover and return to what matters. This book explores these essential relationships, which keep shaping me. Can you speak about the nature of joy and what keeps us from it?
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For me, joy is different than happiness. While happiness is a fleeting mood, joy is larger and more lasting than any one feeling. If each feeling is a wave of emotion, then joy is the ocean that holds all feelings. As I get older, I'm coming to realize that joy is central to our knowing peace. It's one deep way that we access Oneness. I'm also beginning to see that joy is the hum of Oneness. He read poetry and listened to music. He was in good spirits. But by June , his breathing — again — began to falter.
It appeared the cancer cells that had been tamed by erlotinib had now outwitted the drug, and were multiplying furiously. Dutta resigned himself to three or four more months of life. But Salgia said he still had options. They could perform tests to get at the true nature of the cancer; and find out if these new tumor cells expressed an altered mutation that could be targeted. About City of Hope. Diabetes Metabolism Research Institute. Corporate and Foundation Giving. Sunil Dutta stared at a scan of his lungs. Hundreds of tiny nodules melded together into a snow-white mass — each pockmark occupying what was once healthy tissue.
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A normal lung scan is mostly dark grey hues, with a few white spots indicating abnormalities. This was something entirely different. So many, in fact, that during an earlier X-ray technicians had stopped trying to count them. Rather than using a needle, it involves extracting a blood sample to detect markers and mutations expressed by tumors. Dutta was tested almost a year to the day after his initial diagnosis.
While he awaited results of the biopsy, the same sequence of events that occurred the year before, happened again. Again, he was in pain. Again, he was admitted to the hospital. And again, according to the test results, Dutta had a targetable mutation. Dutta lets out a few coughs before his breathing returns to normal. It is a typical exchange.