a commoner's prayer

"This luminous collection offers poems of immediacy and depth. With a disarming naturalness that belies the depth of knowledge of poetic tradition, of the world, and of Zen that this poet clearly possesses—(R.H. Blyth wrote, “Without Zen there is no poetry and without poetry there is no Zen.”)—each of these brief poems has the power to return us to a richer vision of this very life, just as it is. Reading them I found myself surprised, delighted, and grateful."

Buddha said, ‘If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole lives would change.’ In a commoner’s prayer Joan White leads us toward this kind of revelation. Through her patient, contemplative inquiry we are taken from the whorl of a 6,000-year-old shell to the physical pain of the global pandemic—from the bud of a rhododendron to the origin of human kind—from a button on a tattered coat to the heart of a family. With tender observations and diligent curiosity, White’s poems speak to the balance between patience and urgency so critical to our times. These poems of desire and awe guide us to the miracle of deep connection in the vast universe of everyday life.​

"Joan White’s common/uncommon poems exist in ‘the little hour/crossing the border from life to story/and back again.’ It's that little hour that makes her journey so remarkable, so alive. She is kin to the 17th century Japanese poet Bashō, who in his masterful haibun The Narrow Road to the Interior, blurs traditional distinctions of poetry and prose, of external and internal worlds. In her own stunning haibun, White moves between ways of looking at the world, between everyday speech and elegance. She infuses scientific factoids with the mystery of a Zen koan. This collection is rich, full of journeys ranging from meditations on global migration to tender family memories to wildfires and floods and the fall of democracy—but White reminds us that flowers changed the world. A commoner’s prayer is a gem, full of spirit and love, of celebration, of yearning, of common sense."