Down in the White of the Tree Spiritual Poems

The marriage of poetry and spirituality is of course an ancient one, and in Down in the White of the Tree, Tim J. Myers works in that tradition. But his isn’t conventional religious poetry, some of which, he believes, is either inadequate for genuine spiritual seeking or antithetical to it. Myers works from the larger tradition, in which Rilke speaks of God as the profoundly distant Center on whose outermost periphery we reside—and from which Hafiz can assert that the universe is “just a tambourine” for us to play against our “warm thigh[s].” These are poems of doubt, of faith, and of a profound love for the radiance we can encounter in the world.

Tim J. Myers is a writer, songwriter, storyteller, and senior lecturer at Santa Clara University. His children’s books have won recognition from the New York Times, NPR, and the Smithsonian; he has 15 out and more on the way. He’s published over 140 poems, won a first prize in a poetry contest judged by John Updike, has three books of adult poetry out, published a nonfiction book on fatherhood, and won a major prize in science fiction. He also won the West Coast Songwriters Saratoga Chapter Song of the Year Award and the 2012 SCBWI Magazine Merit Award for Fiction.