Given the experiences recorded in this
volume, anyone might witness the energy of the cosmos, an
instant of it, by concentrating on a twig or a weed, and
also, by such concentration, experience the stillness
which subsumes the self. Put aside the
subjective and the objective, and one will find myth; put
aside myth and one will find phenomena; put aside
phenomena and one will find nothingness; put aside
nothingness and one will find the self, truly at home,
again, in the cosmos. Vic chose the following poem as
representative of The Silence of Blackberries:
Holiness and the Ceaseless Motion
With what sweet but
hard-won wisdom he confronts the world, this poet! I only
wish that I could understand and accept the hard
realities that Vic Depta has made peace with. He finds
them everywhere and recognizes them as opportunities. It
must be true that, as he tells us, "the universe has
an infinite number of centers/each small and vulnerable,
and transparent as the air itself."
Fred
Chappell
These poems are not
only expressions of mystical experience, but are also
meditations on the mystical, and the idea and history of
the mystical. They are meditations on consciousness and
identity, and the way consciousness veers from the vivid
fact, the risks of the everyday, to the highest sense of
connection, communion. I value the honesty of the poems,
and the recognition of the paradoxes of mystical desire.
I value the candor, and the elusive sense of the sacred
at the end of one millennium and the beginning of
another.
Robert
Morgan
I like the sustained,
quiet seriousness, the meditative language that reflects
a life of casting off trivia and taking on the beauty of natural things.
I like the weaving of earth and sky, as in "Minor
Gods in the Coal Fields," with its highly textured
language. Depta’s words provide a "little
feast," a dance of luscious particulars. Here the
sensual and spiritual are wedded. Work and spirituality
seem made for each other. My favorite poem is "The
Sixtieth Spring," where the poet articulates the
via negativa in idiomatic speech that wins
us over: "What an old truck I have/a hundred
thousand miles/the dashboard bleached, sun-
split..." The poem is sealed tight in its own
startling imagery
and unpretentious music. B convinces us, like William
Carlos Wilhams, that the poet is truly concerned with
"what is common in bliss."
Marilyn
Kallet
