“I had other presumptions once, but after a certain age and the cold logic of bereavements, life does indeed seem a lesson in leaving and poetry a better grade of litter.”
                                  -E.M. Beekman

ISBN 0-9629651-4-6
108 PAGES
$14.95

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 Poetry as Litter - A Writer’s Legacy

     In his new book of poetry, scholar and prolific wordsmith, E.M. Beekman has determined that poetry is appropriate clutter for a writer to leave as a legacy. He has assembled a stunning collection of poems that largely chronicle his life experience. The poems take the reader from Beekman’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland to his sojourn with his abusive father in Indonesia, through his adult life, his marriages, fatherhood, and the challenges of academia in his adopted America.

     Beekman’s poetry has been described as “acerbic, disturbing, earthy, and bizarrely comic.” In contrast, his poems also reflect his search for beauty and peace in an unsettled, often cruel and disappointing world. Beekman regards nature as the ultimate solace, “the one that gives and the one that taketh away.” In his final chapter, “Nature (Solace)” Beekman presents a lovely and tranquil series of short poems that stand in sharp contrast to his sardonic accounts of failed relationships, personal terrors, ludicrous contemporary culture, and the disappointments of academic life. Beekman’s intellectually sensuous poetry reflects a lifetime love affair with language.

Reviews

     “Acerbic, fierce, brilliant, and vulnerable by turns, The Litter of Leaving turns out to be Monty Beekman’s Grand Testament to a life lived in the shadow of the Nazi occupation of his homeland and the subsequent struggle to survive by picking through the vast rubbish of the Academy of Western civilization and the compromised promises of his adopted America in the last half of the twentieth century. What survives is an unabashed eroticism and a faith in the healing properties of human love and kindness. Not surprisingly, his totemic animals turn out to be the grizzled, solitary bear, who ‘sniffs the air and woofs at nothing,’ and the Spermaceti whale, whose sonorous head, scarred and blackened, somehow remains mercifully lit by song. Read him. His bitter songs are like some strong herbal medicine and have the power to make you see things as they are.”

     “I’ve been reading Monty Beekman’s poems for thirty-three years. I find some of them disturbing, some earthy, and some wonderfully and bizarrely comic in their insights and observations of the frailties and foibles of our own kind. His poetry is always smart, always erudite, and—uncommon in contemporary poetry—always accessible. And besides that, he has the eye of an etcher: unblinking, sharp, clean, and mordant. This is why I read him and why I look forward to reading anything new that comes from his pen.”

     “E.M. Beekman’s magisterial edition of the twelve volume Library of the Indies and his definitive translations of the work of Rumphius are important additions to the literature of our time in English . . . He has written poetry for much of his life. The Litter of Leaving brings us, in that poetry, another and more intimate aspect of his work, his attention, his mind . . . and makes the whole of it available to readers already indebted to him for his essays and translations.”