Tag: Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

‘Your Face in the Fire’ by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books, writing

I’m pleased to see the release of Lowinsky’s sixth poetry collection on June 1. A Jungian analyst, Lowinsky creates poetry I greatly appreciate, including Adagio and Lamentation in 2010 from Fisher King Press.

From the Publisher

“Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s soul was shaped by deep impressions made on her by India, where she lived for two years in the 1960s. It was there the Goddess claimed her. It was there that myths began singing to her. It was there her soul remembered other lives. It was there her stars insisted she learn to tend her fire. And the fire spoke: I am the heat of your passion. It is I who will show you your way.”

Blurb

“Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s book of poetry: Your Face in the Fire, speaks with an impassioned voice which opens us up to that vast space which we find in Jung’s Red Book. It is a vibrant standpoint from which she encounters the mysteries of the psyche. Through her poetic imagination, we get to participate in her vision-making process. Nourished by her dreams that invite us to imagine with her as she expresses a lifetime of creating, engaging, reflecting, and reworking while showing us how her process is not only transformational for her but for anyone who opens up to the reality of their experiences of psyche’s being. The archetypal dimension shines through this book.” – Sam Kimbles

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of magical realism short stories and novels.

Book Review: ‘Adagio & Lamentation’

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books, reviews6 Comments

Adagio & LamentationAdagio & Lamentation by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A delicate writing desk stands ready for use in a sunny room on the cover of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s collection of poems, Adagio & Lamentation. The room is filled with light from the world outside the high arched window. The watercolor painting by the poet’s grandmother Emma Hoffman (“Oma”) displays a room Lowinsky saw many times as a teenager when she visited Oma’s house.

One can imagine Lowinsky working in such a room with a pen so sharp that it tears the paper, cutting through the desk’s polished veneer to carry ink and light deep into the primary wood. “I wish you could stop being dead,” Lowinsky writes to Oma in the opening poem, “so I could talk to you about the light.”

The nib on Lowinsky’s pen shreds the curtain of time that conceals her ancestors and allows them to speak. “The spirit of my dead grandmother came to us as we lay after love in the renovated Old Milano on the northern California coast.” The spirit’s words in “ghost gtory” cut deep. In “Adagio and Lamentation,” the poet hears her father playing the piano while “our dead came in and sat around us a ghostly variation/and my grandmother sang lieder of long ago.”

Lowinsky’s collection of poems is organized into four sections, “before the beginning and after the end,” “what broke?,” “great lake of my mother” and “what flesh does to flesh.” With strength, certainty and intuition, the poems live and breathe on their pages, and when experienced together, comprise an ever-new song about long-ago wars, colors, shadows, moments and people.

Joy and sorrow dance slowly in the light throughout Adagio & Lamentation. From the opening invocation to Oma to the closing “almost summer,” Lowinsky’s words—written with “a flicker of serpent’s tongue in her ear”—tear through the paper-thin present and drive their way deep into the underworld of the unconscious where the inspirations of her muse are fiery, erotic, earthy, transcendent and whole.
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–Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “The Sun Singer,” “Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey” and “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.”

The spookiness of written truth

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn fiction, magic2 Comments

Some people have a built in BS detector. They can see the flaws and scams in the world’s best publicity.

Writers have a spookiness truth detector.

In her excellent book for writers, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, author Naomi Ruth Lowinsky begins with one of my favorite Robert Graves quotes:

“The test of a poet’s vision,” writes Graves, “is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess. The reason why hairs stand on end, the eyes water, when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation to the White Goddess.”

The experience Graves describes is similar to that spooked feeling one gets while walking down a lonely road at night and pondering what might be watching him from the dark forest, or while walking through an old house at night and thinking of yarns about it being haunted or that people were killed there or that something lurks within that isn’t human.

When a writer reads or writes the truth, the bells and whistles of his spookiness truth detector go off. Now, this detector won’t help him decide whether Mobil or Valvoline is better for his car or even whether he can get the meal his body needs on any given night at Olive Garden or Outback.

No, the spookiness truth detector is usually reserved for matters of the heat and soul, gods and goddesses, sun and moon, and for thoughts and ideas that are only too happy to go bump in the night.

When I read, I want to be spooked either by thrills and chills and excitement or by the truth of important things. When I write, I know my revisions and edits are done when my eyes water and the hairs on my arms stand on end.

If you’re a writer who is in tune with his muse—or, say, with the universe—then you may feel spooked when you read Lowinsky’s book. Truth be told, my BS detector went off while reading certain sections of Robert Graves The White Goddess. But it didn’t go off when I read The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way.

But, I’m not here to convince you to buy the book. I’ve been feeling spooked while researching and writing my novel Sarbande and while reading through a lucky haul of good novels lately.

I’m not frightened, mind you. I just wanted to spread out the chills a bit.
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I’ve started a new web log called Sarabande’s Journey to share some of the heroine’s journey resources I’ve found while working on my novel. If you are reading about, writing about, or on such a journey, I invite you to stop by and see if anything there spooks you.

—Malcolm