FROM BSP PUBLISHING
Old Dancers
Collected poems 1973 - 2017
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Poetry on love, life, loss, and the art of living
Limited edition of 50 copies
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25.99 + 3.50 shipping throughout the United States.
International shipping costs determined based
upon delivery destination and quanitity
purchased.
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Old Dancers
Simon Green
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The dancers have been reborn
As trees and tangled jasmine bushes
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The singers have come back as birds.
They make the walls shake with high pitched harmony.
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The dragons have returned as the four great winds
In four sizes: breeze, wind, gale and Storm
The fans who could not buy a ticket for the shows
Are wheeling thieving gull demons now.
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And what about yourself?
Did you jump the line to see the dancing show?
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Is that sandwich the gull has stolen
Really yours?
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Only I have come back as I was
More blind, less deaf
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But as my inimitable self of course
The Sleepy crocodile
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Can you see my eyes?
And what’s become of my jaws?
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"with a handful of words, he could conjure the divine..."
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​Jeremy Mercer
Author
aaas
A word from Jeremy Mercer
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As a young man, I had the good fortune to stumble upon the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. Though it did sell its share of novels and biographies, it was far more than a bookshop. The owner, the late George Whitman, had squeezed a dozen or so beds among the shelves and allowed people to live in the store so they could have time to read, to write, to immerse themselves in the glories of the French capital. Over the years, the bookstore became a refuge for literary souls and rootless wanderers.
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During my stay, I met artists and writers, charlatans and philanderers, spiritualists and millionaires. Amid this kaleidoscope of characters, perhaps the most remarkable was Simon Green, Shakespeare and Company’s poet-in-residence. He’d been invited to stay for a few days but ended up living in the store’s antiquarian room for more than seven years. A flamboyant Englishman in his middle 50s, he was often foul of mood and acid of tongue. But Lord how the man could write! A proper critic would call his style lyrical naturalism; all I knew was that with a handful of words he could conjure the divine from something so common as a bird winging across the Jardin des Plantes or a cherry tree in spring blossom.
Simon Folland Green was born in London in 1943. As he lay in hospital, Luftwaffe bombs struck, killing several infants in the maternity ward. As the story echoed through his childhood, it shaped Green’s vision of the world as a random, absurd, and ultimately untameable place. After a short career in advertising, he left England in the 1960s to follow a love to Paris. He followed her again to a quiet country home in the Spanish province of Granada in the 1970s. Then, there was the return to France where he worked as a teacher and translator before eventually arriving at Shakespeare and Company.
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The one constant across those decades has been his poetry. He has been published in literary journals in both Europe and North America, yet remains largely unknown outside a small circle of connoisseurs. This is mostly due to his own reluctance to engage in the seamier side of the business: the submissions to literary journals, the quarrels with editors, the pandering to audiences. Instead, his poems gather in stacks, waiting to be discovered. This small collection, written from his current home on the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer, is a rare and precious opportunity to read a poet who was long considered the hidden genius of Paris.
Simon’s garden
Jeff Bien
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Marigolds, marigolds, marigolds, he madly sings
with his lovely knotted hands, night perfumes of the one most perfect thing.
Potting half-blind, with a gnarled palm, the doggerel of a crippling love,
washing his impertinent past, grouting, cleaving the wolven half-sounds.
Painting now those frail laryngeal petals, of indestructible meaning,
the fragrance of fresh marigolds that clasp the sun in the tumbling nubby twilight.
​Geraniums, geraniums, geraniums he cries, and the sky goes black
as the black-eyed Susan’s, black tulips, and Simon with his crooked blacked out teeth.
There where he straightens the nasturtiums spine, and waves his wand,
above the chain of boulevards in the Capucine, whispering in a Celtic song.
Kneeling by the entrance that low lines the ground, lilting toward the heart
that rounds the gouache of thick watercolour, a triptych of night stars.
Lifting his brush into a tiny fury, the enthusiasm of one more hourglass glance
breaking the earth with the sulk of incandescence, a garden of gratitude and clandestine wrath.
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Shingly little tiny stones pollinated from a boulder eighty million years old,
the wild quiet coast, pummeled, and the gaping orange peonies festering with ants.
Tarting up the mole-hilled lot with impatience, petulant monkey flowers, thyme, clover and lavender and the Durban white daisies with faded buttons, laced by toothless yellow bones.
In the rough box, a gigantic fuchsia, tied tall with a ribbon of string, named after Nana
the old dog, whose wagging tail purses still suddenly in his dreams.
Another he calls Christina, hardy as the whizzing of hummingbirds’ wings,
gone now, glib and deathless as the sea wolf gilded inside.
And a third spiraling on a trellis, in memory of Suzie Dow, the niece whom so he loved,
loathing the dalliance that blesses her unrequited name.
Captain, oh my captain, as slowly he weeps, the corpulent noise, lacelike in the marrow,
the universe at war with war, in every flower, that goes untried, and undrawn there.
In two hundred million years the Himalayas will be plains, the sea his rotting teeth
and nothing more or less true than the stars, as far as they are near.
The bloom in the vase, vassal and Lord, even now signing the both of us,
“here be dragons”, they deftly curse, in an odd vehicle of tongue.
At the edge of the universe, the sparrow kings pluck the dying light, night of the hungry ghosts,
the local fishermen chant ex voto, the unanswered prayers of hope and joy.
The skylark seed bursting into climbing flowers, chasing a godless god,
wild tropes in the little lanes, collapsing under the weight of the roses.
Dear, dear, loveable friend, may your masked eyes catch moonlight
in your frayed palsied hand, that holds the homeless there, smiting the structured glacial sounds.
In the long night of human, the wild chant, in the green hangers of every wild flower
that blossoms in the last of us.
A bright moon shrinks, shines on stray cats and lover’s untroubled lips
and nothing speaks.
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Forthcoming 2019
We are pleased to announce that we will be publishing a chapbook by Jeff Bien, Simon’s Garden, in 2019. Bien is one of Canada’s most prominent writers, and his poetry and music have been internationally acclaimed and recognized by poet laureates and Nobel laureates alike. His work has travelled the world and been published, performed and translated in well over 60 countries. Commensurately known for his consciousness, meditation, and spiritual teaching, he is listed as the lineage of several meditation, consciousness, social activism and advocacy organizations.
A number of composers have put musical compositions to his poetry including Emanuel Reverdi and Mercan Dede, whose previous album was number one in the world. Dede chose three of his poems along with a selection from Rumi, a rare recording of Gandhi, and other seminal figures, which were performed on numerous world tours and received airplay in dozens of countries. One of the pieces was selected for the annual compilation album, George V records. Reverdi also composed music to a selection of his work, which was released throughout the world on several labels including EMI and Melodie records.
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Bien is also releasing UNMASKING MEDICINE, The physician as healer: Essays on consciousness and compassion is a seminal collection of essays by internationally acclaimed writer, Jeff Bien. The work is the culmination of more than thirty years of study, research, direct experience, and advocacy on behalf of thousands of persons suffering as a result of a catastrophic systemic failure in the kleptocracy of health care, while incorporating an exegesis for the many meritorious physicians, struggling within that very system.
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Besides proposing a more sublime understanding of the pilgrimage that integrates holistic and allopathic traditions, and the radical transformation of the gross to subtle perception of the physiological body, the work unveils the imperative of unmasking the lacunae of contemporary medicine, unearthing healing as the heart of true medicine. It also addresses iatrogenesis in its myriad forms, in what has become the institutionalized corporate nature of allopathic medicine, both its inherent illness and its cure. These seminal essays address the absence of consciousness in medicine, and commensurate lack of attendant compassion, both in research and patient care.
Bien has met, corresponded, and engaged with some of the finest contemporaneous minds in modern medicine. He has also lectured and spoken widely, regarding what he calls a pandemic that continues to be unacknowledged and unaddressed at its very core.
Two of Bien’s latest books will be launched in 2019, So say I a collection of Sufi poems, and a lifetime’s work, Songs on Non-Separation: teachings on consciousness and spirituality. in 2019.
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