Home Was Elsewhere
Home Was Elsewhere reveals the intimacies of Stanley Fefferman’s 20-year sojourn training in the world of the charismatic guru, Chogyam Trungpa. The poems show the author making himself at home in the master’s world by his exertion in meditation practices where discipline is ornamented with spontaneous behaviours traditionally connected with Crazy Wisdom. The poems in this unique collection modulate from sex through spirituality to playfulness.
About The Author
Reviews of this Book
Fefferman’s first collection registers, sometimes in the same poem, the tension between the call of an inner world of experience (the complexities of love, the layers of memory) and the equally insistent call from the world outside (landscape, birdsong, weather). What is it? the poet asks in one poem. What’s it like? he asks in another. And to answer these questions he repeatedly zeroes in on le mot juste or the perfect image as he does, for instance, in “Caroline’s Laughter” both jackhammer yammer and kamikaze bumblebee.
– Ricardo Sternberg
When I first heard Stanley Fefferman read his poems I was struck by their musicality, humour and wisdom. … His poems are meditations on moments in which he dissolves the boundaries between the self and nature, challenging us to reconfigure our perception of reality with playful words and phrases and lines that surprise us with their shifting tones of voice. It is a poetry filled with insight and gratitude.
– Laurence Hutchman
So many words were perfectly surprising, so many lines lifted off the page. Many poems had the pleasing shape of a circle, or a spiral, or a leaf either drifting from branch to ground, or rising into the sun.
– Randy Roark
