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| The Temple on Monday |
| Tom Crawford |
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| Book of the Year Award 2001 Bronze Medal —ForeWord Magazine |
| Pushcart Anthology Author 2002 |
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Poetry
113 Pages
ISBN: 0-910055-72-6
Paper: $14.95
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Without compromising his Western identity, Tom Crawford brings us the spirituality of the East with his own American working class pragmatism. The Temple on Monday explores the people, culture, and landscape of Korea through the emotional lens of a compassionate expatriate who gives voice to the mystery and wonder underlying everyday life. Crawford is unsullied by pretension, unapologetically honest, yet he is able to find beauty in a traffic accident, and he can discover the story of a nation in a pair of abandoned shoes. Lyrical at times, he writes in a tone of quiet authority, and his verse is as unhurried as a light snowfall in Kwangju or the waters of the Bean-Paste River.
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| Tom Crawford's three previous collections of poems include If It Weren't For Trees, China Dancing, and Lauds, which won the Oregon Book Award in 1994. He has been recipient of fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts and his work has been widely published in journals and anthologies. He has lectured and taught at colleges and universities throughout the western United States, taught three years in the Peoples Republic of China, and five years at Chonnam National University, Kwangju, Korea. He now lives in Portland, Oregon. |
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| Praise for The Temple on Monday |
| "Crawford has a modest poetic talent, but he is also a modest man, and he has been places, teaching three years in mainland China and five in Korea, the setting or subject of most of these poems. His unassuming manner allows him to speak easily through economically in the free verse and prose poems collected here. All the latter are good, whether focusing on the big shoes another American teacher left behind when he went home, a ceramic tea bowl a potter friend gives Crawford to take with him back to Korea, the way modern tourism compromises meditation at some of Korea's great Buddhist temples, General MacArthur's lack of sympathy for the Koreans, or balancing the delection of dinner at a great Korean restaurant with an embarrassing impromptu "English Lesson." These and such verse poems as the two that bear the book's title and the handful about the poet's Korean love affair beautifully suggest what looking at Korea through American eyes can be at its best."
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—Ray Olson, Booklist.......... |
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