—From the Preface by Ivan Argüelles
A sample stanza from the poem Snowy Owl: And the snowy owl calls forth within us The questioning that can keep us on edge Which is the only place where we are Alive to the present which is the dance Of past and future through each fiber of Our bodies which are – temporarily – Repositories of eternity-
I know of no contemporary poet who is more grounded in a poetics of the metaphysical than Frederick Bauman. He is obviously a poet of great erudition with a deep sense of the traditions of poetry, ranging from the archaic and classical poetries to such “modern” poets as Walt Whitman or Basil Bunting. His sense and awareness of nature in all its grand sweep from the micro cosmos to the macro cosmos inform his poetics, which might also be a poetics of the body both corporal and spiritual.
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The poems in this volume are experimental in nature. They came out of a study of the enneagram—a symbol best described in P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. While looking for a way to experience the laws expressed in the enneagram, Frederick Bauman devised a poetic form of nine verses of three lines each. The poems are presented in the order written and then the stanzas are rearranged in the order 9, 3, 6, 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7. Readers interested in the enneagram are referred to Mr. Ouspensky's book and the “Holy Planet Purgatory” chapter of G. I. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, which does not mention the enneagram but discusses the laws it symbolizes.
2007 | 110 pages
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In his latest collection, Bauman continues the sensitive and detailed inventory of his environment and the soul's interaction with nature and the realm of spirit.
2011 | 70 pages
