Last June, while I was in Decorah, Iowa, touring the Vesterheim Museum with my friend, Ann, I got an email informing me that the manuscript for my second collection of poems, Cloud Song, had been accepted for publication by Kelsay Books. As you can imagine, I was ecstatic! I asked Ann to take a photograph of me in that moment. Here it is:

(Photo by Ann Wilson Lacy)

It is fitting, perhaps, that behind me is the twenty-five foot, hand-built ship, TradeWind, that Harald Hamran and his brother, Hans, sailed from Norway to New York in 1933. According to the logbook Harald kept in English, ““Our chances are slim, but no matter. It’s great to take chances when all things are against one.” That is certainly the way it can feel when one sends out a single poem–like a message in a bottle–or a collection of poems–a buoyant but fragile bundle of reeds lashed together into a raft. It certainly feels like a small species of miracle to see one’s poems bound together into the form of a book.

Cloud Song is arranged into three sections–poems inspired by the sea; poems inspired by landscapes, gardens, and plants; and poems inspired birds, ,sky, weather, and constellations. I suppose there is a sense of journeying underlying them all–journeying inward or outward bound.

I think Harald Harman sums up the hazards and the excitement of the creative process: “It hurts…especially when admiring the silvery moon, and thinking of a dream girl ashore, to be rudely awakened by a flying fish in the eye.” But that flying fish…that’s what’s memorable!

If you would like to locate your own copy of my new book, it is available locally at Content Bookstore or at Amazon. Here is a poem from the collection:

The Best I Have to Offer
 
I make my poems into little paper boats,
put a light in each, a small votive candle,
then sail them into the dark.

They are borne on my experience, over
shoals and snags, the salt and cold rot,
monsters and sinuous beauty rocking deep beneath.

Poets always know that their fragile vessels
may never reach the other shore or
even see the morning, but
what else can we do?

Poems are precious;
the light they carry is
the inestimable treasure of witness.

Together, flotilla of millions,
they form new constellations,
fling back radiance into the ocean of stars.

Leslie Schultz

HAPPY SAILING! HAPPY READING!  LESLIE

(Author Photo by Atia Cole)

Norwegian Book Case; Vesterheim