Bøker av Richard Lyons

Richard Lyons brings his creative talents to an exploration of some of the most vexing and profound questions about war in this imaginative series of epic poems. But by the Chance of War is reminiscent of the great Greek and Roman works. Each of the four parts ranges in setting from ancient India to Colonial American, to battlefields of modern Europe and to a conjectured scene in the contemporary Mid East. Throughout the animated and lyrical writing, Mr. Lyons examines our impulses towards combat and encourages the reader to contemplate the seemingly inexplicable dynamic towards destruction despite our conscious knowledge of war's ultimate futility. Each play features memorable characters who come to grips with the implication of technological advances that hasten the scope and velocity of casualties as they grapple with the moral questions of individual responsibility, the nature of military leadership, and the impact of the evolution of war on civilizations. Those who join Mr. Lyons on this epic quest will gain new insights into human nature.

The poems in Sleep on Needles disperse human consciousness beyond us vs. them tribalism to create fleeting bonds with any number of species: a garlic flower, some gibbons, a Greenland shark, a nautilus, a blue whale, a rat. Trying to leave room for the impossible, these poems crave experience outside of language. They eschew convenient certainties including homo sapiens' historical claim of dominion over plants and animals. "Memory decants identity," one poem claims, and, thus, within these poems, identity and persona are on the move and always about to change.