The Cairns: New and Selected Poems Bill Brown: Author
The Cairns: New and Selected Poems represents over
thirty years of writing and publishing poems, by author
Bill Brown, beginning in the early 1980’s. The title
poem uses cairns, stacked stones, metaphorically: “I
stack words to remember what words alone / can’t say.
The tongue is an eye, a poet wrote, / not just a choking
muscle, fumbling with age. / The earth a grave of lost
words, stones / and children’s bones; a cairn, itself,
crude and holey… .”
Words About The Poetry Of Bill Brown
Bill Brown has been honing his craft and writing some of the most emotionally
engaging poetry available. With this new book, he has achieved what few
contemporary poets have, a voice that is intellectually rigorous and linguistically
accessible. These are poems in which love—desperate, dangerous, and
courageous—brings us here, to this poet’s world, in all its evocative power.
—Kathryn Stripling Byer, Descent
About The Author
Bill Brown is the author of ten
collections of poetry and a writing
textbook on which he collaborated with
Malcolm Glass. During the past thirty
years, he has published hundreds of
poems and articles in college journals,
magazines, and anthologies. In 1999,
Brown wrote and co-produced the
Instructional Television Series, Student
Centered Learning, for Nashville Public
Television. Since 1983, Brown directed
the writing program at Hume-Fogg
Academic High School in Nashville. He
retired from Hume-Fogg in May, 2003
and accepted a part-time lecturer’s
position at Peabody College of
Vanderbilt University. In 1995, the
National Foundation for Advancement
in the Arts named him Distinguished
Teacher in the Arts. He has been a
Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts, and a two-time recipient of Fellowships in Poetry from the Tennessee Arts
Commission. In 2011, the Tennessee Writers Alliance awarded Brown: Writer of the Year.
Selection From The Cairns: New and Selected Poems
The Cairns
They’re stacked beside the creek
on a hidden gravel road—patience
and craft, the artful searching,
seeing, chipping, shaping. Mostly
limestone, each rock—millions of years
forming, fossilized, story-filled—itself a cairn.
The hours spent in rugged contemplation,
water burble, wind in leaves, the forest’s sway—
a present for those who pass as the earth
crumbles in time what human hands have made.
I stack words to remember what words alone
can’t say. The tongue is an eye, a poet wrote,
not just a choking muscle, fumbling with age.
The earth a grave of lost words, stones
and children’s bones; a cairn, itself, crude and holey.
The gift is in the labor , mother taught—
scraped palms, broken nails, tired backs,
the ordered wonder of shape.
About The Press
at the confluence of culture and creativity
3: A Taos Press is a multicultural and ethically voiced independent publisher
committed to fostering and honoring the work of writers of all cultures.
The publisher is pleased to host readings, book signings, workshops, and
ekphrasis events throughout the year across the United States featuring
its list of contributors.
Our editors and authors may be contacted at www.3taospress.com or at:
3taospress@gmail.com.
Purchasing Information
ISBN: 978-0-9994848-0-7
Publication Date: November, 2018
The Cairns: New and Selected Poems is available directly from the publisher for
$25.00 with free shipping
3: A Taos Press Bookstore: www.3taospress.com
The book also is available from Amazon.
3: A Taos Press
P.O. Box 370627
Denver, CO 80237
Please contact the publisher for special price for classroom sets:
3taospress@gmail.com
