Publication Reading for Nearer to Never, with poet Robert Mason

The Womens Club of Albany, Sunday, Sept 27, 2015, 7PM. Followed by a book signing.

725 Madison Ave, 3^rd Floor, Albany, NY 12208, (518) 465-3626.

MORE DETAILS HERE.

After decades of inquiry, my dear friend Robert Mason is publishing a seminal collection of poems, Nearer to Never (excelsior editions/SUNY Press, Sept 2015). Robert and I have been working side by side for over thirty years. We began looking at each other’s poems in the Half-Moon Café in downtown Albany decades ago. Robert is a visionary. He has quietly been steadfast in celebrating the essence of life for years with his mammoth heart and keen eye. I have learned a great deal through the years from him and continue to. So I’m thrilled to be heading to Albany to help celebrate the publication of Nearer to Never. The two of us will offer a reading together. If you’re in the Albany area, please join us.

—Mark Nepo

From the Back Cover of Nearer to Never:

Recalling Blake, Baudelaire, and Eliot, Mason addresses the innately sacred, melding philosophy, aesthetics, and Buddhist precepts into a lyrical work that is truly modern and avant-garde. The critic David Appelbaum praises these poems when he says, “There is ease and dignity in the craft these poems bring to the hope of attainment. The language is sensitive and triumphal. And it is alert to the curve that truth throws. Striving after truth is a salient feature of Mason’s work. The success of his mighty struggle is clearly marked in this book of the unmanifest.”