Tongue of a Crow

by Peter Coyote

Overview

Peter Coyote’s first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the Sixties to psychedelic spirituality and beyond.  Written over several decades, these poems read as a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive lyric narrative.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945588952
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	09/15/2021
Series:	Stahlecker Selections
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

An accomplished actor in more than 130 films, Coyote is an Emmy Award-winning narrator of over 200 documentaries and 17 audiobooks. He has written two best-selling memoirs, Sleeping Where I Fall and The Rainman’s Third Cure, and contributed to other books and publications. Coyote is a politically engaged person who has championed a multitude of causes. He is also a songwriter, guitarist, singer and Buddhist priest. This is his first poetry collection. Coyote lives in northern California.

Read an Excerpt

Thirtieth Year

On the verge of the creek’s-edge field
my young dreaming
hard against the turbulent water,
boys new to long pants
trading girlie pix, Viceroy butts behind
the garage. Rods, reels,
silvery spinners shimmering out,
tempting the fish. The whip
of fiber poles, the flash
of line easy as promises to a
girl I thought was stupid.
She turned her head
to check my lips aimed at hers.
Don and Woody weren’t dead
from bullets in eighth grade, released
to the muddy suck of the stream.

Table of Contents

Paris: A Leica and a Raincoat 3

I.

Papery Old Lady at My Green Light 7

Speeding Through 8

Do We All Mourn? 10

Earth Is a Woman, Sure 14

Thirtieth Year 17

Periodicity 18

Toxic Sugar 20

Two Conversations in Chicago 21

I Woke with a Woman / Zazen 23

II.

London Run 27

1972 30

Poppies 31

Mining Words 33

Still Life 34

The Hairless Cuckold 35

The Dogs of Bucharest 37

The Only One Talking 39

Cold and Clear 40

The Vigilant Dog 41

III.

Chateau de Garraube 45

Place de la Concorde 47

Plink-Plunk 48

Sun of Honey 49

The Edge of the Seine, Gorged on Spring Rain 50

IV.

Six Cold Comforts 53

Attending a Death 54

Snow Geese and Crows 56

World on Fire 57

A Charley Horse 58

Birthday Call 59

Yahrzeit 60

Ceremony 61

Hawk Feathers 62

Grinding Fine 64

Olema, Winter 65

The Little Bird 66

3 a.m. 67

Don't Wake the Sleeper 68

V.

Olema 71

Election 72

Bodhidharma Traveled West 73

The Burned Oak 74

Do the Dead Miss Us? 76

Equinox 77

Spilled Rice 78

No Jar, No Lid 80

Where Oh Where 81

Exhalation 82

Notes

Editorial Reviews

Peter Coyote’s new book Tongue of a Crow is incandescent. At first read, his poems are all energy—kinetic universes exploding or imploding, line by line; transformation engines charged with immediacy, sometimes edgy, sometimes elegiac: ‘[m]ixing his mother’s ashes / with birdseed, elbow-deep/in a galvanized pail, / swishing the whispering / seed with ghostly flour, pollinating each grain/with her smoky voice and pearls.’ A Ferris
wheel turns at the center of this book, the Big Wheel, and you sense the depth at the core, the apprehension of transience. Utterly personal and specific, these poems channel the impermanence in which we all live and die, not knowing why we love our suffering, certain only that ‘the world is burning.’”
—D. Nurkse

“Pete’s first poetry collection is a knockout. It reveals the same keen intelligence and wry perspective he showed in his two memoirs, with an eloquent, unique style that lays bare the universal in the deeply personal. He can add gifted poet to his already impressive resume.”
—Bonnie Raitt

“Peter Coyote’s poems are every bit as wonderful as his memoirs, rich and lively, sweet and perplexed, full of sorrow and laughter, love and lovers, soul and bodies, Zen and wild mother nature, truth, hope, disappointment, resurrection; ie, Life with a capital L.”
—Anne Lamott

From the Publisher