A Preacher's
POEMS


By Mike Young

Copyright © 2009 by Mike Young
All rights reserved.
140 pages, ISBN 0-9639231-5-3, Softcover, $12.95

A Preacher's Poems is a spiritual knock-out delivered as a rare combination of profound wisdom and lyric beauty.

 

Book review:
"First Unitarian Church's minister imparts wisdom of faith with poetry..."

by Mary Adamski, the View from the Pew features columnist at the Honolulu Star Bulletin. (Read the complete review on the starbulletin.com website.)

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Letter from a Reader

Dear Mike,

It is Monday on board the ship Millennium. We have just exited Doubtful Sound, New Zealand and are entering the open Tasmanian Sea for a few hours. I have finished reading A Preacher’s Poems and wanted to tell you my experiences with it. Bear with me. It will take some telling.

I slipped your little volume into my luggage intending it to be the very first thing I would open when a deck chair became available on the first day of open sailing. But I couldn’t wait so I was sneaking peeks at it in the airport and on the airplane. Occasionally I had to turn to my traveling companion, my sister Monica, and say “Monica, listen to this.” She would agree with me that whatever I had just read to her was very sensitive or profound.

Just as we boarded the ship Monica developed an awful head cold so for the next two days she barely left her bed, sleeping, waking to take some sustenance then sleeping again. After several days, she was still in bed; feeling not tired enough to sleep right then but having no ambition to hold her own book or magazine. I offered to read to her and asked what she would like it to be. She said, “I would like you to read your friend’s poems to me.”

So for the next hour or so I read your book to us both, to the end of the poems section. Several times she would say, in her softened laryngitus voice, “please read that part again” and we would both agree that that was a particularly powerful or beautiful sentence or section. Once, on a particularly lengthy stretch of words, when I failed to get the rhythm or intonation just right she stopped me and said shouldn’t it be “................,’ getting every single word in exactly the right order with exactly the correct phrasing. I said “God damn it, Monica, you are REALLY listening.”

My point in relating this is to show you how engaged we were with your beautiful book. There are so many corners of pages turned down to places I want to be sure to return to, it looks quite well worn on the very first reading. But to return to Monica: when I put the book down and we were both digesting, to use an incorrect metaphor, what we had just finished experiencing, she said, “That man is a terrific poet” and a little later she said “You should ask him if you could read and record those poems. You read them really well and I think there might be a wider audience for them in spoken word in this electronic age.’’

I love your book. I love the title, the front cover, the back cover, the size and the way it feels in the hand. I am not through reading it, which requires more returns to those turned down pages, otherwise I would be tempted to leave it in the ship’s library to let some other poetry lover enjoy it contents.

With great affection,

Karla Jones

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Revised: April 13, 2009