Welcome to Earthrise Press
Frederick Glaysher

"Our world is desperately in need of this message of peace, love and humanity." —Rev Eric Williams, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Rochester, MI

"Impressed, moved to laughter, tears. Held our attention for 90 minutes, stayed so energized, a feat in itself. A creative, powerful message with so many of the poet masters, phenomenal! Amazing life-time work!" —Rev Leonetta Bugleisi, Unitarian Universalist

"A great epic poem of startling originality and universal significance, in every way partaking of the nature of world literature." —Hans Ruprecht, Carleton University, Canada

"A remarkable poem by a uniquely inspired poet, taking us out of time into a new and unspoken consciousness..." —Kevin McGrath, Lowell House, South Asian Studies, Harvard University

"Mr. Glaysher has written an epic poem of major importance." —ML Liebler, Poet, Department of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

"And a fine major work it is." Arthur McMaster, Department of English, Converse College, South Carolina, in Poets' Quarterly

"Don't be intimidated by an epic poem. It's really coming back to that image of the storyteller sitting around the campfires of the world, dipping into and weaving the story of humanity, in the most beautiful, mellifluous language." —New Consciousness Review Radio, Portland, Oregon


NYC Interview with Andrew Cortes. 32 Minutes
Stage Whispers Apple Podcast 338 The Parliament of Poets or on Stage Whispers Website


The Parliament of Poets

The Parliament of Poets: An Epic Poem. Thirty years in the making, The Parliament of Poets takes place partly on the moon, at the Apollo 11 landing site, the Sea of Tranquility, a Journey toward healing the planet.

In a world of Quantum science, Apollo, the Greek god of poetry, calls all the poets of the nations, ancient and modern, East and West, to assemble on the moon to consult on the meaning of modern life. The Parliament of Poets sends the main character, the Poet of the Moon, on a Journey to the seven continents to learn from all of the spiritual and wisdom traditions of humankind. On Earth and on the moon, the poets teach a global, universal celebration of life.

One of the major themes is the power of women and the female spirit across cultures. Another is the nature of science and religion, including Quantum Physics, as well as the “two cultures,” science and the humanities.

Review

"Very readable and intriguingly enjoyable. Frederick Glaysher's hours of dedication have produced a masterpiece that will stand the test of time."Poetry Cornwall, No. 36, England, UK


The Myth of the Enlightenment

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays. These essays and reviews were all written during the 21st Century, with many of them central to Glaysher's evolving intellectual and spiritual struggle to write his epic poem, The Parliament of Poets.

The essays open up Glaysher’s own biography and his life-long interest in the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, John Milton, Saul Bellow, Robert Hayden, and other poets and writers, offering a fresh, new vision for literature and culture.

Reviews

"I'm glad it exists and I'm grateful for the wisdom it sends my way." —Laurence Goldstein, Department of English, University of Michigan

"In an era in which the value of human life has become as precarious and narrow as the study of the humanities itself, we need Glaysher’s voice more than ever." —Phillip M. Richards, Department of English, Colgate University


The Grove of the Eumenides

The Grove of the Eumenides: Essays on Literature, Criticism, and Culture. Frederick Glaysher invokes a global vision beyond the prevailing postmodern conceptions of life and literature that have become firmly entrenched in contemporary world culture.

East and West meet in a new synthesis of a global vision of humankind ranging over classic literature, ancient and modern, both Western and non-Western, from the dilemmas of modernity in Yeats, Eliot, Milosz, Bellow, Dostoevsky, to Lu Xun, Ryuichi Tamura, Kenzaburo Oe, Naguib Mahfouz, R. K. Narayan, among others, from mimesis and deconstruction to the United Nations, with extensive essays on Chinese, Japanese, and South-Asian literature. This book is the foundation upon which Glaysher's epic poem The Parliament of Poets rests.

From New Preface (January 29, 2020): "All the essays in The Grove of the Eumenides were written after 1982 when I wrote my first draft of a plot outline for my epic poem The Parliament of Poets. These essays constitute and record my background study, as it were, over a period of more than twenty years, leading up to their publication in 2007..."


Into the Ruins: Poems. Into The Ruins confronts much of the human experience left out of the balance. Suffused with a global tragic vision, into the ruins of the 20th Century, Glaysher has his gaze fixed firmly on the 21st. Lyric poems and dramatic monologues.

From Preface

"The work of such artists as Francisco Goya in his war paintings and Los Caprichos, Kaethe Kollwitz’s drawings, Wilfred Owen’s poems of WWI, Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” and many of the poems of Robert Hayden, a fellow Detroiter, were powerful examples and influences on me that spoke to my sense of life and helped open the way forward for me as a poet."

Reviews

"At high points, his poetry captures the feelings of contingency and horror felt by many but expressed well by few... Glaysher fits well within the literary tradition, as he shows with his allusions to or mentions of, among others, Augustine, Dante, Yeats, Dostoyevsky, and Hayden; however, his voice is distinct. Among contemporary poets, few have a vision as darkly haunting.... Few also have the knowledge and the ability to handle contemporary issues with such presence of language. Out of the mass of recent poetry books, here is one you should read." Jack Magazine   

"A litany of horrors updating Eliot’s Waste Land, the book upbraids poets for turning inward only to concerns of the self." North American Review


The Bower of Nil

The Bower of Nil: A Narrative Poem. Peter Marsh, an academic philosopher struggling with analytical philosophy, weighs modern life in a conversation with his friend, David Emerson, a businessman. Brought together after long separation by the brutal murder of Mary, Peter’s wife, a time of devastating loss and crisis, their friendship inspires a dark night of the soul, during which Peter’s meditations range over several hundred years of philosophy, politics, religion, social change, the dilemmas of existence, evoking a vision of the complexities of the 21st Century, the United Nations, and global governance.

Structured around classical Greek choral movements, the first section ponders themes from Japanese Buddhism, while the second and third survey Western philosophy from Aristotle and Plato through Descartes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, and others, in a powerfully dramatic grappling with philosophy, East and West.

Review

"This is a doorway into the future...  Colored richly and satisfyingly with symbols (e.g., the name Peter, the lily, the lantern) that speak directly to the psyche—the way that artwork spoke to the illiterate in the Middle Ages." —Poems Niederngasse


Letters from the American Desert

Letters from the American Desert: Signposts of a Journey, A Vision. Glaysher reflects on the cultural, political, and religious history of Western and non-Western civilizations, pondering the dilemmas of postmodernity, in a compelling struggle for spiritual knowledge and truth. In what is a highly autobiographical work, fully cognizant of the relativism and nihilism of modern life, Glaysher finds a deeper meaning and purpose in a universal Vision.

Confronting the antinomies of the soul, grounded in the dialectic, Glaysher charts a path beyond the postmodern desert. Alluding extensively to Martin Luther and W. B. Yeats at All Souls Chapel, “metaphors for poetry,” from Yeats’s book A Vision, Glaysher considers the example of the global, universal message of the oneness of God, all religions, and humankind, holding out a new hope and peaceful Vision for a world in spiritual and global crisis.

Far from a theocracy, Glaysher envisions a modest separation of church and state, as the will of God, in an unorganized religion, a universal synthesis of all spiritual and wisdom traditions, in harmony and balance with universal peace, in a global age of pluralism, where religious belief is a distinctive mark of the individual, not collective, communal identity.


Crow Hunting

Crow Hunting: Songs of Innocence. An eChapbook of nine poems written after the poets Henry Vaughan, Blake, Bryant, Emerson, Basho, Hafez, Attar, Rumi, and Tagore.

From the Preface: ". . . so I sought in words of poetry to intimate to an age of doctrinaire nihilism that God still exists, calls us always, if only we will pray and listen to Her."

 

 


"A Little Girl Alongside a Road" about an experience in 1994 (correct date) near Dunhuang, Gansu, relatively close to Xinziang, where perhaps as many as 1.8 million Muslim Uighurs have now been thrown into concentration camps and slave labor by China and subjected to horrifying abuse. We human beings on this planet must honor and protect their dignity and humanity.

October 18, 2021


Spiritual Themes in the German Philosopher Karl Jaspers and British Historian Arnold Toynbee

Universalist Unitarian Church of Farmington, Michigan. August 7, 2022. Starts at 16:58

Frederick Glaysher speaks on the similar spiritual themes in the writings of Jaspers and Toynbee, especially Jaspers on the Axial Age and Toynbee on the need for a universal religion and world government to bring humanity together, with some mention of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Karen Armstrong's own book The Great Transformation, also on the Axial Age.

Sunday Service - Streamed live. https://youtu.be/rZnYfyKws7A?t=1018


Tolstoy's Universality

Universalist Unitarian Church of Farmington, Michigan. July 14, 2019. Starts at 22:02

From 1884 until Tolstoy's death in 1910, he worked on a compilation of spiritual and moral excerpts from all of the major world religions, which he called at various times, A Wise Thought for Every Day, Thoughts of Wise Men, Cycle of Reading, The Path of Life, and A Calendar of Wisdom. The scope of his effort can be gleaned from the titles. Tolstoy's selections are from Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Roman philosophers, Emerson, the Unitarian 19th Century minister William Ellery Channing, who was a major influence on the American Transcendentalists, and so on. A Calendar of Wisdom is worth reflecting on today. Includes selected Readings.


Download the Program for Solo Performance

Other Readings and Performances

Change
Parabola, Spring 2019. Change (51).