The eighty-five evocations comprising UNDER ARIES work regressively and progressively in vision and voice through four hermetic, yet contiguous, segments, of a manchild- from adulthood, fatherhood, work, and death back to childlike awe and wonderment at sensate living as a gestating self emerging and evolving humanly, artistically, and psychically: "Waiting/With the world/For what you are." Recurrent urge-to-order life force renewals of self involving seasonal and brute-animal totemic rites-of-passage dissolve as manchild confronts at every turn his mortality, irrevocable pain and death-physical and spiritual-as epitomized by the innately this worldly, eponymous Aries, emblem of inchoate Nature. Manchild transcends his existential limitations by exploring and accepting absurdly finitude and transience ("A seer in the night" of "[t]he pure despair/Of stones"), by reclaiming all mortal things "under Aries" through endurance, language, and love.

Author Biography

Painter-poet-professor-emeritus, Gordon has taken degrees in Philosophy and Languages & Literatures, been awarded Arts & Humanities Endowment Fellowships for poetry and fiction, teaching & scholarship recognitions, artist residencies, and presented discourse papers and readings at national & international conferences. An expanded edition of GROUND OF THIS BLUE EARTH was recently republished (2012), while EVERYTHING SPEAKING CHINESE was the recipient of Riverstone Press Poetry Competition, NIGHT COMPANY nominated for NEA Western States' Book Awards, and individual works for Pushcart awards. FROM FALLING and OPEN HOUSE AND OTHER FICTIONS, current poetry and fiction collections, are forthcoming. Extensive creative and critical publications appear globally in juried journals. Gordon works in Asia and sits on the graduate faculty of a national university.