Supported through the efforts of A Bibliophile’s Workshop-editorial/publicity services for self-published writers- the first inaugural Blog Tour is here. For this first blog tour, Indulge your mind with some lovely yarns of poetry, perfect as an antidote to life’s trials and tribulations!!
Celebrating the Poetic Legacy of Thelma Barselow, one poem at a time….
Time’s Passing Reflections Blog Tour (September 14, 2014-September 20, 2014)
Like & Share these posts with a wide pool of people, to be eligible to win a special literary prize…. more details about such a prize can be found below!
Capturing the vivid intimacy of journaling combined with the photographic realism of rich poetry, Thelma Barselow’s collection of poetry is a volume of poetry that any serious reader of poetry will not want to miss!!
Synopsis, taken from the Amazon product page:
“This collection of poetry spans the years and encompasses a lifetime of observations, broken down into simple, yet elegant and sometimes whimsical poems. Some of the poems are religious, others are merely soulful.
Thelma has spent her life caring for others, starting with her children and her husband. That career included caring for the children of others, and ultimately, taking care of Alzheimer’s patients which she did until her recent retirement.
She has many stories to tell and I hope that someday she will tell them all. Until then, please enjoy this collection of her words, her thoughts, her passing reflections.”
This is a poetry collection, which Anne Rice made sure to buy five copies for friends and family:
Poem-of-the Day:
**If you have an eidetic memory (the type of memory that lets you recall images and sounds without mnemonic tricks), you may be able to memorize fragments of these poems. Many of the poems featured here will be short, highly visceral,as are most of the poems contained in Thelma Barselow’s poem collection- Time’s Passing Reflections
Today’s featured poem is written by one of my absolute favorite poets, Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop really spearheaded the poetic phenomenon of writing “empath” poetry, which as the word “empath” applies (without any hocus-pocus, new-age connotations attached) is more about the mysterious psychological ability for us to empathize greatly with others.The Man-moth typifies every ghostly apparition of a person, who seems to incidentally become more ghostly, incorporeal, as we become desensitized or bogged down by the mundane, mechanical constructs of the world. We forget that we are hard-wired to be compassionate, and that the ability to greatly empathize with another person’s grief, simultaneously imbibes us with a sense of being, realness. When our emotional experiences are bridged, we can salvage the ghosts and apparitions of the mortuary of the world from without our interior lives, and spare us from neuroticism, self-abnegation, self-pity, and our sorrow, melancholy, and downright feeling of stabbing impotence in the world can be used to link ourselves to another’s experience-see through their eyes- and remind them that there is a purpose for living.
Each time we give the ghosts around us, the withered, vanishing people of a depersonalized world, acknowledgement, appreciation, and above all, empathy, for some struggle in their lives; we are offering life to those people, and they are also offering us life, in a sense, as well. Real empathy is not a situation, where there is inferiority or superiority, but there is an egalitarian exchange almost of seeing, recognizing, and take each other’s burden into one’s another mind, and remembering that there is no such thing as a human struggle that is so far alienated from our experience that we can’t empathize, or learn to understand it. There is no man-moth in the structural jungle of this world, that we can’t learn to understand, and learn to love and appreciate as a fellow human being, worthy of being shown dignity.
One of my favorite portrayals of a man-moth, from literature, is the fascinating character of Miss Havisham, especially as played by the sublime Gillian Anderson.
The Man-Moth, by Elizabeth Bishop
“Here, above,
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
(Elizabeth Bishop)
What does this poem evoke for you? Leave your comments below, with your own deeply inspired thoughts of what you think about this poem, and what images it conjures in your mind?
Stay tuned tomorrow for another poem-of-the-day, and other tantalizing features(special Time’s Passing Reflections tea; an in-depth review of a book by this blog’s own poetry connoisseur), as part of the Time’s Passing Reflections Blog Tour, featuring a new post every day of this entire week
Special Giveaway:
Enter below by clicking this enchanting photo of Station Eleven, with a mugful of Station Eleven-inspired tea, to be redirected to the Rafflecopter App, allowing you to enter this contest
Station Eleven is an excellent, darkly dramatic, slightly sardonic, piece of writing, meditating on the vicissitudes of life, as seen through the lives of various human beings exposed to apocalyptic trauma, and how art itself helps salvage us, give us a reason to claim “mere survival is insufficient.”
*Only those living in the US/Canada are eligible to enter this contest!*
If you have any questions, concerns, about this blog tour, and anything else connected back with A Bibliophile’s Workshop, please do not hesitate to email our center of our operations at the following email address:
bibliophilesworkshop@gmail.com
A Bibliophile's Reverie 
Just discovered this blog — it’s definitely unorthodox. SO MUCH CONTENT, SO MUCH FORM! Got to love a blog that buries a giveaway of a headline grabbing National Book Award nominated new release in understated regular sized font at the end of a post on another topic (or a couple really). Meanwhile, it’s a graphic extravaganza. The eye and mind have much to do here! Thank you for all your work on this creation (I just subscribed today), and thanks for this awesome giveaway! Cheers, Kara S
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