{"title":"Tony Burfield","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"sawhorse-book-tony-burfield-9780997420098","title":"Sawhorse","description":"Sawhorse, the title of Tony Burfield's latest chapbook, comes from an expressive allusion in the poem of the same name; Ripping apart an old pallet for sawhorse wood. The potentiality of sawhorse. Sawhorse spans a year of newness, a marriage, a new house and a new sense of place as the poet embeds himself in the grounding process of work. The honest work of a homeowner, a landowner, a husband, a poet. This is the rurality of rediscovering the self in relationship to each other and to the land; the self as the story of place. The poems comprising Sawhorse are rural, contemplative . . . simple, but not trite . . . and yet, Burfield is not putting on any airs, there are no claims to any mystic insight but for the simple newlywed sense of distracted joy, cramping muscles and newly calloused hands. Burfield's dialect is distinct to the American mountain west. His prose poems are often clipped sentences, phrases and fragments, just enough, like the not-too-heavy, not-too-light layers worn by those of the mountain west to accommodate the swift changes of weather. His palette is the lexicon of the foothills life zone, the mountains and canyons of Colorado's western slope; deer bones, cactus, ponderosa, grama grass (too real, too rural even for spellcheck), crags, canopy, pelvis, vertebrae, cord wood, fire rings, treeless peaks, switchbacks, snow, hermits, the dry heat, the dry cold, winters that mean business, stars, snowpack, aspen, sawdust and sap, slot canyon, flash-flood, wildfire and fear . . . parsing scat, feathers, blood and bone. I found myself instinctively checking my socks for hound's tongue burrs when I finished reading it. Sawhorse is an honest and concise chapbook. Twenty-four poems, mostly haibun, a pairing prose-poems and haiku. Reading Burfield's haibun, I was reminded of the Japanese word fushi (bushi) with it's etymological allusion to a knot or whorl in the grain of wood or bamboo, while also being the word for song; an eddy, ripple or the endless flow of the Universe, turning briefly back on itself. Many works under the bumbershoot of 'ecopoetics' express the complexity of human impacts on our natural environments and ecologies. Sawhorse is a gesture that relates poetries to places, and of the poets work to comprehend and redefine our placed-ness in our natural ecology and place-making practices in our natural and built ecologies. This Button Rock House series chronicles an emerging topophilia, poetry as a form of inhabitance, and well-deserves a place in the environmental canon of the literary mountain west. Short, yes, and sweet at times, like life, like springtime in the rockies; full of possibility, full of potential. ________________________________________ From the forward by David Anthony Martin Founding Editor of Middle Creek Publishing \u0026amp; Audio author of Span, Deepening The Map, and Bijoux. As a purveyor of haiku and haibun, Tony Burfield is a finely tuned, and thoroughly engaged craftsman. With concise precision, as measured as it is on-point, Burfield's eye for detail adroitly captures the human place in nature as lived in the harsh conditions of Colorado high country. Read these poems as attentively as they were crafted, following the poet's own guide: Measure in threes, eye-ball twice, cut once. Don Wentworth, Editor, Lilliput Review These poems from Button Rock House are meditations, not on a place, but in it. A place on the edge of wildness and wilderness, where the beings of animals, trees, weather, and mountains assume a much larger scale than that of their human neighbors. The unique voice, precision, and immediacy of the language effect a transportive experience as we read. In powerful, quiet moments of clear-eyed song, these poems transport us to the present. Renee Alberts, author of No Water","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53490348654865,"sku":"NIN9780997420098","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780997420098.jpg?v=1786136094"},{"product_id":"seeking-the-button-rock-hermit-book-tony-burfield-9781957483047","title":"Seeking the Button Rock Hermit","description":"Tony Burfield follows his chapbook collection of haibun, \u003ci\u003eSawhorse\u003c\/i\u003e, with \u003ci\u003eSeeking the Button Rock Hermit\u003c\/i\u003e, another collection of haibun concerning his local region of residence in the foothills near Lyons, Colorado, and centering around the mythic and elusive persona known as the Button Rock Hermit, first mentioned in his previous collection. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eTony Burfield provides one kind of map through his elusive poetics of naming. Poem after poem follows prints, scat, and scents leading both the speaker and the reader into brush encounters with the hermit. The search grants readers a greater awareness of being within a tiny, little sliver of the planet-a way of being that celebrates, seeks, mourns, and grapples with existential questions including how to seek the hermit given today's planetary ache. \u003ci\u003eSeeking the Button Rock Hermit \u003c\/i\u003eis most definitely grounded in a specific place. But the method of the search speaks to any reader looking to reclaim or deepen one's mythic experience of the Earth in an age when the Earth is so often anything but sacred. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e -Aaron M. Moe, author of \u003ci\u003eexhalations\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eEcocriticism and the Poiesis of Form\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eTony Burfield spent a decade mastering the haibun, and in \u003ci\u003eSeeking the Button Rock Hermit\u003c\/i\u003e, his mastery of the form is on full display. \u003ci\u003eThe Button Rock Hermit has had many names\u003c\/i\u003e, Burfield writes in the collection's first poem, and as promised, throughout the book the Button Rock Hermit takes on the form of the mystery, terror, and awareness of human insignificance that comes with a genuine encounter with the wild. The haibun poems in this collection split time between linear narrative storytelling and immediate meditative presence. On the cusp of the Anthropocene, Burfield's writing should serve as a reminder about what it truly means to live on this planet. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e -Matthew Ussia, Duquesne University, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Red Glass Cat\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn the crossroads of careful observation and in a place \u003ci\u003eso quiet, it's all bug buzz, raven wind, raven croak\u003c\/i\u003e, Tony Burfield realizes that his time in the wilderness is \u003ci\u003emy time to watch and learn.\u003c\/i\u003e Burfield's masterful use of the haibun is the perfect form to track his awakening, in which he shares the spiritual aspects infused in the natural world. In the wild, he \u003ci\u003eskirts the summit regularly, not for sweat, but for sacred loneliness, for tender paths.\u003c\/i\u003e On the trails outside his house in the Rocky Mountains, he longs for the mythic and the authentic, for an encounter with the hermit that may live on Button Rock Mountain. His poetry records his elusive search, pulls the reader up the mountain to immerse us into the wild where he learns, \u003ci\u003eSo as the cougar opens up the neck of the deer, I open my chest up to the harsh light.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e -Kathleen Willard, author of \u003ci\u003eCirque \u0026amp; Sky \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e This Incendiary Season\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e______________________________________________________________________\u003cbr\u003eNote in Memoriam: Before Scott King of Red Dragonfly Press passed away, he graciously awarded the manuscript for this book the Meadowhawk Prize. This manuscript was then reacquired by Middle Creek Publishing. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout The Author\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eTony Burfield lives with his wife in Pinewood Springs, CO and works at the Boulder Public Library. His poetry has appeared in \u003ci\u003eBombay Gin, Modern Haiku\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eRattle\u003c\/i\u003e. In 2017 his collection, \u003ci\u003eSawhorse\u003c\/i\u003e, won the Fledge Poetry Chapbook Award.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":54651189592337,"sku":"NIN9781957483047","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781957483047.jpg?v=1789231249"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-tony-burfield.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}