Craig Milewski currently resides in the northern Adirondacks. After twenty years, he retired from Paul Smith’s College where he taught a range of courses in ecology (e.g., wetlands, streams, watersheds, ecological restoration) and the humanities (e.g., creative writing, poetry and nature, the stirring of an ecological conscience, the healing wilderness). Life prior to NY included ecological work in the fields of conservation and environmental science in Michigan, Utah, Minnesota and South Dakota. He completed an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and describes the experience as liberating. His poems have been published in the Blueline and the Midwest Review. Retirement finally affords him the time to fully engage in his creative interests: poetry, writing, and oil painting.
Click here to purchase Delivered this Way directly from the author on Amazon
Delivered this Way explores the undercurrents that can pull us along unwittingly until we realize that our genuine selves have been obscured by imprinting and expectations. Even as separation occurs, a place inside speaks through a silent dialogue with Nature, or through a sudden revelatory voice that surprises. Separation is manifold: with oneself, with other people, and with Nature. But Nature seems to wait, indifferent, in her own way, benevolent. Separation leads to a dark place; and the struggle ensues to recover, endure, and return to a better place where we see ourselves in Others, and in the timeless moment when we surrender the drama and see beyond the veil.
These poems are a bit of a myth journey, an attempt to share experiences that have some universal qualities found in everyday joys and sorrows, interspersed with the wisdom of surreal dreams and visions, and tempered by distance.
“Our first birth, in Craig Milewski’s probing new book, Delivered This Way, comes to be preparation for a second birth into an awareness, even an intimacy, with the natural world. We are not custodians, he implies, but relatives of trees, worms, and rivers, something resembling their spiritual cousins. As he says in “The Dawning,” he feels himself to be “among all this civilization/ no civilization, just leaves/ drifting across shifting sands”. Everything moves, even the earth on which we live. This relationship to all things can be heard in his poem, “Through Refracted Light,” where he says to a fish, “We, the offspring to a thousand things.” Or, to an old white pine, he likens its passage to his own. “It had no say in where it was born, or when it would die.” How lucky we are, then, to have a poet like Craig Milewski with such awareness and the skills of recording it so well.”
Roger Mitchell, author of Delicate Bait and Reason’s Dream
“In language luminous, layered, and revelatory, Craig Milewski listens to the voice of nature, the mysteries of the inner life, and the relationship between the two. Primordial questions echo through twisting turns of rivers, through generations, and into the predicament of humanity’s loss of reverence for the earth. “How did I get here? The question floated into an evening sky brushed with a fiery sunset.” Exquisite descriptions of phenomena—the growing, blossoming and dying away, the calls of ravens, and the visitation of icy winds, are interwoven with dreams, specters, and ominous warnings. “Out of the one darkness//the magnetic voice of the thrush.” This poet brings us messages we need to hear. His love for nature evokes a mystical vision of oneness, “Still, a membrane’s thickness / does not separate me from you.” Emerging into the light from darkness, from disillusion to awakening, personal and collective transformations spark hope.”
Patrice Pinette, author of Happiness, A Strange Bird”