"Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves" gathers semi-autobiographical poetry about a boyhood and adult life lived in conversation with nature. In this volume, Sam describes a life shaped by his youth in Pennsylvania and Michigan and his journey by thumb through the Pacific Northwest. The imprint of these experiences molds his ecological holism and sense of the holiness of the commonplace and of all life. All profits to the author from the sale of this book will be donated to the Germanna Community College Educational Foundation. What other poets are saying about "Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves": “David Sam is a poet of deep identity with the natural world. In these intimate narratives of discovery and awe, the poems speak often with an almost breathless urgency, reminding us of the inexhaustible life within life, testaments to a unique sensitivity, in a boy and then a man. In journeys both actual and metaphorical, the self is not different than rivers or sunrise. ‘I am made of water and wild air,’ one poem says. The lucky reader breathes deeply.” - Allan Peterson, author of Fragile Acts and All the Lavish in Common “David Anthony Sam’s poems are literally rooted in the earth, seeded in the rich, dark soil. Whether he’s writing about childhood or the rivers of Pennsylvania, these poems are filled with fields, mountains, lakes, snow and stars; they remind us that human life is found in the morning air, in the golden rays of the rising sun, in a bird’s call as dusk arrives. Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves is an impressive book that will transport you into the natural world where, as Sam writes, you will become ‘forgetful and human again.’” - David James, author of She Dances Like Mussolini, winner of the 2010 Next Generation Indie book award in poetry

Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Sam, David Anthony

Poetry

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

This collection was originally self-published as a chapbook in April 1974. The poems were written between 1970 and 1973, when the poet was 20 to 23 years old. Most are here printed exactly as they were in 1974 except for a few minor edits for this second and 40th Anniversary edition.

Dark Land, White Light

In Stone Bird, Poems of Exile, David Anthony Sam imagines a contemporary Syrian exiled from the civil war but also from all he has known, finding a safer place but not a welcoming one in the United States. Behind the collection lies the diaspora from the Syrian Civil War and the Arab emigration of the last 150 years, including the ghost of Sam's Syrian grandfather who immigrated to America a century ago and did not find the streets paved with gold. Finally, these poems speak to the more universal experience of "exile" as part of the human condition.

Stone Bird

San Francisco Bay Press

In Dark Fathers, David Anthony Sam examines the bitter-sweet juxtaposition of life, death, genetics and the cosmos, Sam provides the reader with a balance and harmony that great poetry and great art illuminates in ways that pure science and pure logic just can't seem to manage. Sam's poetry contemplates every aspect of our mortality and the entire universe here "At the Edge of Stars." All of the miracles of existence just seem to vanish with us. Yet, somehow, none of these poems seem to despair, allowing the reader to be blown into a mist and then regathered as something new and renewed. -Professor Todd Neuman, Editor Emeritus, The Hurricane Review.In Dark Fathers, David Anthony Sam picks at the scab of childhood memories wreathed in ribbons of his father's cigarette smoke. His father was a man "who knew love / only as a hard, thin edge / of glinting blue steel / scraping across his cheek. Through poems suffused with a mixture of anger and regret, Sam bleeds his personal history onto the page and transforms it into a universal truth that all fathers and sons will take to heart.-Bill Glose, author of Virginia Walkabout, Personal Geography, Half a Man, and The Human TouchIn Dark Fathers and Other Poems, David Anthony Sam holds a match to the fuse of familial tension. His reflective vignettes smolder with a desire for acceptance, love, and forgiveness that refuses to remain in the attic with discarded childhood toys. This poet dares to examine his self-image through unblinking eyes in a "face too like my father's." As sharp edges of the past soften with time and distance, David embraces an identity dependent upon, yet independent of, the paternal relationship: "you flow here / in my transient river," a river that "drifts with silence towards / the open prayer of ocean." This lyrical journey evokes the beautiful ache that defines so many human bonds.-Elizabeth Spencer Spragins, author of The Language of Bones: American Journeys Through Bardic Verse and With No Bridle for the Breeze: Ungrounded Verse.

Dark Fathers and Other Poems

Kelsay Books

Writing the Significant Soil by David Anthony Sam explores the long relationship of human life with nature without sentimentality or the cold distance of the clinical eye. Sam's poems reveal his own close connection with the Appalachian Mountains and the red clay of the MidAtlantic and Virginia as he searches for meaning in the act of living on and with the land by using the poetic ink he makes from the soil. The history of Virginia, bled into the earth by war and human struggle to live, interplays with the war we have made against nature and the land. The collection admits the danger we humans impose on the natural world while revealing a simple faith that that natural world will abide even as we as individuals give our identity back into the land we sprang from. The soil is significant in and of itself as life-giving place and because of our history of living on it.

Writing the Significant Soil

Wayfarer Books