April Wind and Other Poems Hardcover - 1992

From the publisher

This collection of short poems written during the 1980s explores a connected group of ideas, feelings, and themes on the experience of beauty. A leader of the New Formalism movement, Turner has said that meter is no limitation to a poet, but a liberation. The strict metrical forms of the poems in April Wind illustrates this position. Written while Turner researched the poetic and neurobiological principles he set forth in Beauty: The Value of Values, these passionate and lyrical poems show a variety of moods, voices, and worlds. Turner's poetry embodies the intuition that the human experience of beauty is both ancient and universal. Beauty, he believes, emerged from genetic-cultural coevolution and is part of the awakening of the cosmos. Turner's work on poetic meter helped to reveal that the three-second line is universal among human cultures, that it is mediated by neurochemical rewards, and that it is in tune with the three-second acoustic information processing pulse in the human brain. The poems in April Wind celebrate the birth and the experience of Turner's discoveries about the nature of beauty. In his own words, the poems deal with the nature of beauty itself and the recognition of a universal process of emergent orderliness, a chaotic but self-organizing evolution; the cosmic teleology implied by the anthropic principle in physics; the emergence of value and meaning out of sensory experience; marriage, and its joyful-shameful juxtaposition of animal and spiritual; the connection between beauty and shame; the pain of personal self-consciousness; the problem of death; and the nature of the passage through karmic attachment, sexuality, shame, and death to the mysticalexperience of beauty.