DOUBLE BOOK LAUNCH - Mark Tate and Prartho Sereno
Free event!
Author Mark Tate shares selections from his latest book of poetry “Walking Scarecrow”, along with former Marin Poet Laureate Prartho Sereno who will share her latest poetry. Audience Q&A, book sales & signing. Refreshments available. Join us for an afternoon of poetry!
Mark Tate
Walking Scarecrow: The Poems of Pineshadow
Walking Scarecrow: The Poems of Pineshadow is a dialogue with Hanshan, the Chinese mountain hermit beloved for his brief poems about life far away from court life in the early 7th century. About thirteen hundred years after Hanshan, an old man who is more scarecrow than active citizen of a community walks each day pondering some of the same subjects that entertained the Chinese master.
Prartho Sereno
Starfall in the Temple
In Prartho Sereno’s poems, the daily doesn’t collide against the cosmic but collaborates with it. Writing with the eyes of a mystic seeker whose heart is wise enough not to take itself too seriously, the poetry of Starfall in the Temple veers wondrously from scientific speculation to natural delight, from mathematical proof to child’s play. More than anything, each poem is a little lesson on how to love properly—and how to love properly, Sereno suggests, is to learn to love all. ~ Dan Beachy-Quick, poet and translator of The Thinking Root
Biographies/Testimonials
Mark Tate is the author of three novels, Beside the River, its sequel River’s End (McCaa Books, 2021), and Butterfly on the Wheel (McCaa Books, 2022). He served for ten years on the Sonoma County Poet Selection Committee for the poets laureate of that county. His book of poems Walking Scarecrow, awarded the Blue Light Press Book of the Year, was published December 2023. He is a long-time resident of Sonoma County where he lives with his wife, Lori.
Poet Laureate Emerita Terry Ehret said that “alluding to the Tang poet Hanshan, Tate writes, “I use what remedy / Is at hand to save the world.” Tate’s depiction of a Zen tea ceremony midway through the collection offers a kind of ars poetica, simultaneously describing the ritual and his verses, “bowing to every honored thing.”
Local poet Sandra Anfang, author of Finishing School: “Mark Tate’s new volume of poems is a microcosm of large-scale wisdom and beauty. Generously including bits of conversations with the ancients – Basho, Li Po, and . . . Cold Mountain.”
Prartho Sereno’s most recent collection, Starfall in the Temple, was published by Blue Light Press, Fall 2023. Her four other full-length collections include Indian Rope Trick, Elephant Raga, Call from Paris, and her illustrated Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives and Loves of Kitchen Utensils, all of which won national prizes.
Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County (2015-17), MFA Syracuse University (2013), and Radio Disney Super Teacher (2005), Prartho attributes over four years in an Indian ashram as her strongest creative influence, but she also credits excursions into other art forms: counseling psychologist, vegetarian cook, mother of 2, meditation and yoga instructor at Cornell University, book and cover illustrator, and amateur singer-songwriter. She was a Poet in the Schools for 21 years and currently teaches The Poetic Pilgrimage: Poem-Making as Spiritual Practice online. https://www.prarthosereno.com
"The magnificent poems of Prartho Sereno reground us in our bodies, in the glistening syllables and scenes surrounding us. They retune us to a tender, more palpably luminous world we would prefer to inhabit."
~ Naomi Shihab Nye