About the Poems - CP
About the Poems
by Cheryl Pallant These poems are from my latest poetry collection, Continental Drifts. The work draws from Daniel Matt’s translation of the Zohar, Edmond Jabes’s The Book of Questions, and the sacred symbolism of seven. The book is full of sevens: continents, literary styles, days of the week, fields within science, emotional states, and so forth. The cosmology of the book draws from mystical Judaism, where words and letters ignite from a divine source, writing itself considered a sacred process. The Hebrew word heenayni, also a title of one of the poems, means I am; I exist; I am present. Pivotal investigations for me involve cognition and consciousness. They are not the name of a rock band. Nothing is static, not earth, laws, commandments, the sentence. I am here writing this line and you are here reading something resembling it.