POETRY AND CRITICISM

This page is for those interested in knowing a little more about my work
as a poet and a literary critic and scholar.  Here are the covers of two of my books.  The
University Bookstore at Cal State University Long Beach carries my books.

The Age of the Mother, published in 1992, includes personal
experience with the mother and other feminine archetypes,
as well as poetry on love, loss, death, mayhem,
hope, faith, and many other subjects, some drawn
from American Indian myth, Christian myth, East Indian myth,
Greek myth, and many other sources (there are even poems
on The Supremes and Aretha Franklin!).  As a unifying image
I use a self-created figure, Jesse Rama-Kali, drawn from
my first and third books, Jesse Comes Back and
Jesse and His Son,  both long out of print but
available in the library at CSULB.

My latest full-length book of poems,
The Alchemy of Opposites,
  was published by
the Chiron Review Press.

From the Long Beach Press-Telegram, 2 April 2000, an article
by Theo Douglas about the first Long Beach Poetry Week,
part of the nation-wide Poetry Month.

Read more about my earlier books.

My book of Jungian criticism, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On
(published by Chiron Publications, Wilmette, Illinois),
includes an introductory chapter on Jungian theory and its application
to literature, as well as chapters on the figure of Merlin in 19th-century
British literature, Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Woolf's Orlandoand The Waves,
McCullers's The Member of the Weddingand Clock Without Hands,
and the archetype of love in the poetry of W. H. Auden.
The painting reproduced on the cover is by William Morris,
and it goes by two names: Queen Guenevere and La Belle Iseult.
I prefer the latter because of my work on the Tristram and Iseult legend.
In either case, the woman in the painting is clearly longing
for a lover who is not present.