The White Lily

In the White Lily you are met by a panoply of voices mourning death, ululating loneliness, apostrophes to absent loves, memoirs of desire and despair, celebrations of beauty. To read them-or more accurately, to hear them-we submit ourselves to experiences we could access no other way. Like visions of melting glaciers, what follows are vanishing emotional landscapes. They will never be seen again. They are memories, desires, wounds-each one inimitable. No sourcerer can conjure them back into existence. If raising them from the dead were possible, it would be the loss of beauty and not the beauty of loss. Perhaps the partial, imperfect reconstruction of a missing love or desire via poetry is what transforms despair. The object of love is no more; its impressions are what remain in us. And for that, the poet alone holds the mirror to the unseen to make meaningful the forgotten. That poetry is imaginative, metaphoric, and artful is a partially told story. These define it literally, hardly fitting for the medium-they seem to describe the pursuit as a kind of falsehood. Yet in its most earnest and open strains, poetry abandons convention for authenticity of spirit, form for substance, and collective norms for the norms of the self. It is sometimes more honest than fact. To read poetry then, we divest ourselves momentarily of our own realities, returning to them as from Alice's looking glass. What we encountered on the other side of the mirror has directly no bearing on our world, and indirectly, every bearing imaginable. I for one feel enriched to read the words of Austin Sarles, and grateful to have the opportunity of introducing them. They are powerful, heartfelt, and necessary. In an age of increasingly unmet eyes, unheard voices, unread faces, untold stories, and undernourished souls, volumes such as these become invaluable. They remind us of an enduring human essence in the face of a rapidly changing human portrait. Austin's words are as timeless as they are modern. As beautiful as they are passing. As honest as they are crafted. This is one face looking outward, offering a white lily. Not to preach or teach or destroy, but to remember, to reflect on innocence, to yearn. Your eyes may meet the gaze of humanity. "...if they did meet, your pretence would fall off you like an ill-fitting robe and you would be forced to live in my existence." -Raanan Robertson

Author: Austin Sarles

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Publication Date: May 27, 2014

Number of Pages: 120 pages

Binding: Paperback or Softback

ISBN-10: 1499710232

ISBN-13: 9781499710236