The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems
Illustrated throughout with drawings by Gary Brown

By Morton Marcus


Ostensibly a day-long hike through the Santa Cruz Mountains, The Santa Cruz Mt. Poems is composed of 56 short poems that trace the interior route toward spiritual understanding as well as the physical exploration of a place. The book is divided into two sections.

"Anyone who picks up and reads Morton Marcus’s early The Santa Cruz Mt. Poems soon learns that Marcus is an accomplished and powerful poet."

Jerome Mazzaro,
The Cream City Review

Each section records a different time of day as well as a different season, the opening section moving from dawn to noon during the sunny season, and the second section from noon to night during the rainy season, so that the hike through a single day becomes a journey through an entire year. The poems are divided equally in each section, and the poems of one section contrast with the poems of the other, creating a counterpoint that reflects the tensions, dichotomies, and ultimately the harmonies of the life cycle.

This is the 20th Anniversary Edition of the book , which was originally published by Capra Press (Santa Barbara).

The Author

Morton Marcus has read his poetry and conducted poetry workshops in dozens of universities throughout the country, among them Columbia University, Notre Dame, The University of Oregon, and several University of California campuses. He has also been poet-in-residence at several State University of New York campuses, The University of Arkansas' Graduate Writing Program, and Providence College.

Morton Marcus taught English and Film at Cabrillo College for thirty years, until his retirement in l998. His sixteen-part televison history of film, Movie Milestones, has been shown on many cable television stations, and is the main visual source of film history at the AFTRS, the Australian national film school. He has been a longtime co-host of KUSP radio's "The Poetry Show" and is the co-host of the film review television show "Cinema Scene" on the AT &T Broadband network in Santa Cruz and San Francisco. He also leads a film discussion group at Santa Cruz's Nickelodeon theater on the first and third Saturday of every month. He has curated film series at various museums and has taken part in several panels on literature and film at the John Steinbeck Center.

Appropriuate Readers

The Santa Cruz Mt. Poems will be of interest to anyone who enjoys nature poetry, especially nature poetry suffused with spirtitual overtones that tugs startling telluric imagery from the psyche.

Reviews

"Reading The Santa Cruz Mt. Poems, I thought of others who have gone after the spirit of some place. Marcus makes them look blinded by the deaf, dumb sufaces of things; he goes beyond them and finds voice for things of his world....These poems deserve the fine printing they've been given."
Barton Sutter,
Crazy Horse

"This carefully put together sequence of poems takes us on a journey into nature—a journey which sometimes leads beyond the world of things into the inner region of the self....Marcus' Roethkean kinship with minimal forms of life....often yields a fresh lucid poetry....solidly grounded in the physical but also opening into the spiritual. A handsome book."
Norbert Krapf,
Library Journal

Title: The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems
Publication Date: 1972
Length: 70 pages
Size: 9.5 x 7 inches

Soft Cover
ISBN – 10: 0-932319-03-3
ISBN – 13: 978-0-932319-93-6

List Price: $12.95

Special website price - $10.00 with free shipping!