Fordword by
Edward Sanders, Woodstock, NY
Welcome to Shiv
When I first met him, Shiv Mirabito seemed shy about his poetry,
writing it now and then on long yellow note pads. He was part of a
poetry workshop I conducted in early 1997 on Saturday mornings in
the offices of the Woodstock Journal on Tannery Brook Road.
He had a flair for images observed in nature, and I knew he was
interested in Hindu and Tibetan religions.That year a bunch of his
friends encouraged him to get beyond his shyness, so that during the
following months he gathered together a short sequence of his works
for a chapbook. I learned that most years Shiv would spend several
months in the winter in India and Nepal, and in 1998 he began
publishing a series of chapbooks and poetry anthologies at a press in
Kathmandu.
As for “Welcome to Freaksville,” it begins with a series of haiku-like
three-liners on themes from nature, and then proceeds to poems of
self analysis and self-encouragement, poems celebrating his
friendships, and peripatetic poems of seeking and roaming. The
tension between roaming and resting lie at the heart of these 20 poems.
Finally, his poems speak of infinity and karma, as the one which ends:
a blackened skull has no name
Before that, “Welcome to Freaksville: Poems from Woodstock and
Kathmandu.”
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