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Rhythm and Flow
Ceylon Moon is a reflective poetry collection exploring memory, dreams, aging, identity, nature, and the search for meaning in a finite life. You organize the collection into five sections exploring childhood, dreams, sanity, nature, and aging. How did you decide on that structure?
I approach organizing how my poems are presented once I reach ~ 30 publishable poems. The organization is based largely on how the poems were written: as part of a project based on my interests, or those arising spontaneously based on an impression or mood. For example, in Ceylon Moon, the poems of “With [In] Sanity” and “The Voices” were projects in which the poems were created after months of study or observation. In contrast, the poems in “What The Night Holds” were more spontaneous in nature: triggered by an image, an idea floating through my mind, or my infatuation with another poet’s work. For example, “The Owl in Our Dreams” was prompted by Philip Lamantia’s enigmatic poem “The Owl.” When enough poems are written, they often coalesce around a common theme. When poems don’t fit into a specific theme, I categorize them under a vague title (eg., “Moods and Musings”).
Dreams are a recurring theme throughout the collection. How do your dreams influence your writing and understanding of yourself?
It’s important to understand that dreams emanate from the emotional (“mammalian”) centers of our brain (ie., the Limbic system). Our animal nature models our world and lets loose neural phantoms inside our mind. These phantoms speak through our higher (cerebral) functions of symbolism, language, vision, and explicit event memories. This is what stirs our sleep with important shards of meaning, as well as insights that evade our waking life. Such insights are not pronouncements about who we are. Rather, they reflect our unfiltered feelings, concerns, and struggles. And sometimes, they provide lucid insights into others we evade through rationalizations. Ones created to maintain a tenuous relationship.
I’ve studied my dreams for 40 years, and have come to know myself with greater clarity by doing so. I believe dreams and poetry travel the same pathways in the mind: one by night and the other by day.
Music, paintings, landscapes, and memories often intersect in your poems. How do different art forms influence your poetry?
Rhythm and flow are dominant in how I write poetry because I’ve been a drummer since I was 10 years old, and rhythm pervades my daily life. Poetry and song have had an intimate relationship since antiquity, and as a lifelong musician, that’s where I belong as a poet.
In terms of the visual arts, I’ve loved paintings since I was a child, implicitly recognizing them as W.H. Auden’s Secondary Worlds (our enchanted, sacred world of imagination). I began to notice the relationship between poetry and painting after years of discussing art with my friend, the artist Martha Diaz (who created the artwork for Ceylon Moon: Martha Diaz Fine Art).
Both painting and poetry attempt to induce a sense of immediacy for the experiencer. Both forms draw us into their world without necessarily understanding why. Only that their immediacy exudes something that is deliciously enticing, finally, it’s important to spend time with an image as well as a poem. To look at an image is an activity, rather than seeing (a physiological perception) and walking by. Similarly, glancing through a poem is like walking past a painting. We (including myself) need to spend time with a poem. Coming back to it again and again. Often there are layered meanings to be discovered and coveted.
If you could have readers carry one idea from Ceylon Moon into their own lives, what would it be?
I would simply say take to heart D.H. Lawrence’s observation: An act of pure attention brings its own answer. That has been the foundation of every poem in this collection. It’s how I struggle to evade my chattering mind. To dwell for a moment or two or four on all the beauty and richness of life that surrounds us and sometimes passes by¾like the smiling toddler without his stroller who turned around my hollow day (the poem “Becoming”).
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What the Night Brings are a series of poems delving into the nature and vagaries of our dreams. The many unsettled aspects of dreaming is extended into the next section “With Insanity” (or “Within Sanity”) explores” the near thin edge” that separates our uncomfortable ideas about what actually constitutes sanity, insanity, and what lies in between.
The Voices are six Rilkean poems in which Gedaliah assumes the personas of non-sentient nature (eg. clouds, mountains, trees, etc.) to explore what it is that resonates within us that draws us to them. The collection closes with All That is Worn and Torn (from the last poem in Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus) explores the inevitable decline and closing of our own life and what solace and wisdom we might take away at the end.
The series of poems rises above the fear and despair it describes to reach for a higher position or acceptance, gratitude and love for the journey we’ve taken. Even for those who believe (like the author himself) that there is nothing more than what we hold no longer. The poetry of Ceylon Moon is consistent with his previous books in that they confront the darkness and chaos but do not wallow in despair, but shines a light upon all that makes life worthwhile that is found in the closing poems Because My Time is Limited and What is Life?
Ceylon Moon
Ceylon Moon is a poetry collection built around memory, dreams, aging, identity, nature, and the uneasy business of trying to make meaning from a finite life. Aaron Gedaliah organizes the book into five sections that gradually move from childhood and personal recollection into dream life, questions of sanity, imagined voices from the natural world, and finally the experience of growing older. That structure gives the collection a real sense of progression. Early poems such as “I Am Becoming” capture the almost overwhelming vitality of childhood, while later poems look back on youth from a much greater distance. Gedaliah explains in the preface that childhood, dreams, sanity, nature, aging, and the absurdity of life are the central concerns of the book, and those themes keep returning in different forms.
The collection is especially strong when Gedaliah lets an ordinary experience open into something much larger. A toddler running downhill, a morning beside the Mekong, an old temple, a text message from a former lover, a pair of glasses, or a sleepless night can all become occasions for thinking about memory and identity. The poems frequently move between the physical world and an interior one, so landscapes, music, paintings, dreams, and personal recollections seem to talk to one another. That quality is especially vivid in “Ceylon Moon,” where a neglected piece of art becomes almost sentient, carrying with it distant places, submerged memories, and an atmosphere of longing. The language throughout the collection tends toward the sensory and dreamlike, with recurring images of moonlight, water, twilight, trees, music, silence, and shifting shades of blue and violet.
Gedaliah also has a playful philosophical streak, particularly in the “With [in] Sanity” and “The Voices” sections. Poems such as “Being Insane” and “Being in Between” treat sanity and madness less as fixed opposites than as forces people continually negotiate, with conformity on one side and freedom, impulse, and creativity on the other. In “The Voices,” stone, trees, clouds, mountains, and the sea are given their own perspectives, and the effect is surprisingly intimate. Nature becomes a way of talking about stability, memory, surrender, and the human desire to find significance outside ourselves. “A Song of the Sea,” for example, imagines the sea as an ancient rhythm binding us to existence, while “A Song of Letting Go” turns the seasonal loss of leaves into a meditation on accepting time and change.
Toward the end, the collection becomes increasingly concerned with aging, physical decline, estrangement from a more automated world, remembered intimacy, and the approach of death, but it keeps returning to gratitude and connection. “Because My Time Is Limited” places the speaker’s brief life against an immense and indifferent universe, yet arrives at astonishment. The closing poem, “What Is Life?,” reduces the book’s many questions to a simple chain connecting truth, memory, love, and the fragile experiences that give a life its meaning. I’d recommend Ceylon Moon most to readers who enjoy reflective, philosophical poetry and who are drawn to writers such as Rilke, Pessoa, Camus, or poets who use dreams, art, music, and nature as ways of thinking about consciousness. It should especially resonate with readers who’ve reached an age where memory feels less like a record of the past and more like something living alongside the present.
Pages: 84 | ASIN : B0HFQPBLZN
