Poetry. Book + CD. WATERS IN THE AFTERNOON is a poetic and musical journey into the heart of a great question. Both intimate and epic in scope, it echoes Eliot's Four Quartets, Tagore's Gitanjali, and Rilke's Duino Elegies. But WATERS IN THE AFTERNOON stands unto itself. Three powerful stories unfold in narrative poetry and prose, concluding with eight "Canticles" (set to music on an accompanying CD, sung by Lori Hedrick Helfand) of lyric intensity. The seemingly unanswerable question of maya, or Illusion, resounds through them all. As in chiaroscuro painting, WATERS IN THE AFTERNOON uses shadow and light to create a third dimension. Its haunting rhythms, its riveting narratives evoke the ineffable in the silence beneath words. It calls us to face without fear both the mystery inherent in our personal journeys and the Mysterium Tremendum that is beyond telling.

Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA

Claudia Jensen Dudley has been a poetry teacher and storyteller through California Poets in the Schools since 1990, bringing the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and many other myth and story cycles to San Francisco public school children. She has published a volume of poetry, The Fragrant Fire, a chapbook, In the Scale of Worlds, and has set her own and her students' poetry to music.