All text (except blurbs) and images copyright Tim Myers 2008
Dear Beast Loveliness:
Poems of the Body
by Tim J. Myers
BlazeVox Press 2013
Dear Beast Loveliness explores the riches and the struggles of that most fundamental of human experiences: having a body. Some of the most profound paradoxes we know involve our physical nature. On one hand, we all know the body with absolute intimacy; on the other, our perceptions and values vary astonishingly. Then there’s the ancient drama of fulfilling bodily needs and urges, with the concomitant struggle in how we think and feel about such things. It’s this fascination that led me to write these poems.
--Tim J. Myers
"If you haven't yet felt the joy of reading the poetry of Tim Myers, Dear Beast is a wonderful place to start. Openhearted and alert to the world around him, ever connecting wisdom and wit, his poems are stirring, entertaining, and even edifying. Really first rate in every way."
--Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy and She Loves Me Not
"These meditations on the blessed carcass move us from bed nest to city street, from cellular self to divine sensation. How do we humans recognize who we are in Vietnam, in Rwanda, on a back porch where rain softly falls? Through the body, says Myers, through the body."
--Rebekah Bloyd, author of Seabook
"There’s an extraordinary exuberance in Tim Myers’ voice as he celebrates the human body in these beautiful poems. From the cellular level to the divine, he sustains a tone of awe that utterly delights. Sleeping, shaving, walking: nothing the body does is mundane in Myers’ world. And his poems of lovemaking with his wife soar with passion and playfulness. Although Myers doesn’t ignore the body’s betrayals— illness, disability, death— his perception of the body returns again and again to wonder and gratitude, even the skeleton in all of us rejoicing, "I am the hidden, white, and dancing tree."
--Claudia Monpere McIsaac, poet and writer
"The pleasure, the puzzle, the power, the pain; the sweat, the stains, the confusion, the clarity: Tim Myers explores the body in all of its rich paradoxes in these poems. Whether odes to parts of the body, elegies of family lost to disease, celebrations of love making, keenly observed lyrics of others’ lives,
contemplations of science and history, or remembrances of a Catholic boyhood in a sexually super-charged yet repressed America, Myers’ poetry examines how the body is there shaping our reactions, filtering our experiences, raising us even to spiritual heights while also betraying us through disease, desire, and unexpected twists of genetic code. Throughout, he writes with humor, sorrow, compassion, and a joyful intellect, suggesting that of all the parts of the body, his heart, in all its metaphorical capaciousness, fills these poems with insight and wonder. "
--Kirk Glaser, Co-Editor of New California Writing; Senior Lecturer in English and Santa Clara Review Advisor, Santa Clara University
Because we are "pale sun" of ovum and "burrowing stars" of sperm--because we are carbon from which "existence itself draws out such music as is our being"--because our decay can begin as quickly as our conception--because we are both prayer and miracle--Tim J. Myers exalts the "happy animal" of the body in Dear Beast Loveliness. Myers celebrates the body in all its forms, whether a boy punting footballs that "lie at all angles like dark birds/ hunters have stunned from the autumn sky," or the "palsied boy who walk[s] like a stutterer stutters," or the sister whose anorexia turned her body "thin as a rake-handle," or the "clash and tempest of desire" between man and woman. There is no body, limb, or organ, Dear Beast Loveliness says, that doesn’t deserve a praise song."
--John Olivares Espinoza, author of The Date Fruit Elegies
For Nick
Two days after Voyager's robot sensors
first gathered the music of Saturn (its toning cry,
where solar wind meets planetary bow shock,
fired back to Earth across a billion miles)
and we stood in the auditorium to hear
over the big speakers
its boom and crackle and bell-like moan--
two days after, I stood by your mother and heard
your birthday arrive, fetal monitor
transmitting to us from the depths of her body
that muffled whooshing of your tiny heart.
So tell me, Nick: Which was more mysterious,
and which came from farther away?