Tyler Knott Greyson just unknotted my tangled heart! A review of "Chasers of Light." by no one in particular...Me.

Some days I feel on fire with creativity. The whole world is offering up it's beauty by the minute on such a day. My efforts to pull down all the streams of interpretation, the colors and memories still fail me, even in scribbled notes, or notes to phone. The intake is far more than I have time to process and create from, for which, I guess I'm grateful. Today has NOT been one of those days

To be pithy is commendable. To be artistically profound AND pithy is a rarity.

On google+ there was a map, vertically formatted with some type-writer words that caught my eye. (This was at 11:45, Saturday March 28, 2015.) 70 minutes ago. It was the little structured ink-filled words on that image that stopped me and made me double click. This, sadly is a big deal now-a-days when the online presence is full of all types of writers...not only the "genius" or "talented". The quote was this:

"Oh, what we could be if we stopped carrying the remains of who we were."

The author is Tyler Knott Greyson. I did the natural thing: Asked myself why poets and/or those people known for deeply moving expressions always have three names?



While pondering such, I googled his name, assuming he must be far gone in time, dead and celebrated in the obscure circles of Laureates. Obviously, otherwise I would know of him. Ha.

Instead, he is the very living and alive published Author of "Chasers of Light." Poetry from a typewriter. (ding) "Sold."

I bought it, as an ibook and will order the tangible too. My patience, a virtue it is not. Two pages in, not even past the introduction, I had to stop and make note of a sentence. "The miracle in the mundane, The epic made simple." That is how he describes the lens with which he sees the world (and uses a camera) as well as capturing the moments that could otherwise drift by or evaporate unnoticed by the occupants of the very same life. Attention, both paid and given to, art like this too small and lost on mainstream, sadly.

The book is a remarkable traipse through love. A book centered on the declaration of eloquence and passion. His words, on different types of paper, including reverse side's of receipts or burnt-edged brown pages. The love-profession is unmatched to my eyes, by so many contemporary poets trying far harder than he.

"What good is a half-lit life? You can burn me to ashes, as long as I know we lived a life alight."

I, pull out some of my writings. I re-read them, scared and searching. I have so much work to do, so much better to be! This collection of poems pushes the best, and worst of my logophilia out into the open. I pause to read my own:

I know with a weight, nearly unbearable, how much pain I have caused him. His words are like delicate offerings, lightly let go from his mouth.

A woman lost in haze of latter days, in the smell of his neck, the taste of that phase.She is found in the release of not needing, not being needed. Hair follicles rise as soft skin mounds at their bases. A field of electricity lined up to attention. A bubbling boils too much to the forsaken, and with his supple lip to her breast, not a fresh mess, she whispers the answer to his call for eternity; 'Yes.' 

Try as I am, to see a glimmer of his type of talent between the spaces in my sentences, those minutes and that doubt. And then I exhale. I am
not AS good, but not as inferior than I thought. Words, like life re-read, can remind you.

It hurts to read. My believed inadequacy pangs in fear and my heart itself aches at the beauty. I am inspired again, by the way his words, small and unassuming to the eye can lead to devastation. The knowing, depending on who you are, that which you have is also had by others, or worse,  never having had it all.

And the pain (of reading HIS words) endures...

"I am so tired of waking to the blank canvas of morning and knowing it won't be painted with you."

"I promise to plant kisses like seeds on your body so in time you can grow to love yourself like I love you."

A collection like this is for lovers of love, seekers of elegance, and those inspired to write every word filled to brim with the infusion of how something feels. They (you) can read this book, as I did. I read it all at once in the solitude of awe.

Anyone untouched by these words in some way, I deem soulless.

"An ocean of difference exists between making love and being made by it."

Chasers of Light, Tyler Knott Greyson