Seduced by metaphor: Timothy Pilgrim collected published poems by Montana native Timothy Pilgrim, also the co-founder of Cairn Shadow Press, is a gathering of 400 poems, tight and original, their titles a 10 on any Richter imagination scale.
Pilgrim stimulates readers with content both genius and mad.
To use wording from “No giving up” in 2015, Pilgrim’s poems “gain enough grace to repaint souls, eat bitter hearts, force-feed geese, put gray doves of peace to sleep — with luck, make each day a blessing, joyful chance to explode mosquitos, count ravens, zigzag mow, herd flies, do gravestone math, vacuum cats, circle ruins on a map — at sunset six nightmares late, fence in darkness, recite night sky, dream all the blackness back to light.”
When the volume was being compiled, Pilgrim had 497 poems accepted or published (a number of them published more than once) by 107 different journals, anthologies, other publications — even a grade-school booklet about Pilgrim’s life. (Pilgrim had 612 acceptances by December of 2023.)
The result is a volume certain to beguile any reader.
The collection, like its title poem, evokes a love affair with creative language replete with memories vividly mixed with dreams.
As pre-reviewed by Glen Larum, Waltz Against the Sky, Kirkus Best Indie Debut Novel, 2019, and also Leaving Montana: collected poems and A Longtime Gone (Walking Three Bar T Publishing, Inc., 2020):
“Finally, Timothy Pilgrim, the poemwright for whom we’ve been waiting, has come along, turned the poetic page and walked us through the century — the one we lived in. The sheer density of imagery in Seduced by Metaphor is what authenticates his poetry as the real stuff. The more you read, the better it all gets.”
The collection is available for order at independent bookstores and national and international sources such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.