Eternity Is That

Blair Mountain Press 2015

ISBN  978-0-9861789-0-0

With a title that pays homage to the Native American Ghost Dance movements of the mid- and late-19th century, this collection questions (and manifests) the age-old human tendency to call on history and magic for rescue from the apparently hopeless mess of the present. The poems comment on our shared means of connecting with powers larger than ourselves: fairy tales and other fantasies to bolster our spirits and to stave off evil—our own and others’; the games we run to exploit others or to survive exploitation; and perplexing riddles about human nature and our mostly unknowable motives. 

"Ghost Dance Poems has wide variety and a large fund of wit and depth...taking us to the world of legends and myths as well as up close to the texture of our everyday lives." Meredith Sue Willis, author of Oradelle at Sea and other novels, most recently, the science fiction novel, Soledad in the Desert. 

Blair Mountain Press 2012

ISBN  978-0-9768817-7-3

After 2,500 years, Buddha’s silence on the question of metaphysical absolutes—are there meanings of reality transcendent of the material one—still lingers as a haunting fear that he was silent because he was kind enough (or wise enough) not to tell his followers that there are no transcendent meanings, that to know ultimate reality is to experience the meaningless meaning of the physical world, including ourselves as participants in it.

That meaninglessness is the premise on which the poems and essays in Twofold Consciousness are based.  The poems, though with intellectual content enough, are an emotional response to the condition of self-conscious estrangement from the un-self-conscious universe, while the essays are a further exploration of the self as opposed to the Buddhist no-self—a distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness, which Buddhism isn’t clear about—self-consciousness as an illusory epiphenomenon of language—and the consideration that material reality is made tolerable by the ecstasy of the enlightened experience (an experience of noumenal reality), and by the compassion rising out of meaninglessness.

The phrase, twofold consciousness—in addition to the obvious distinction between poetry and prose—refers to our two states of consciousness—a mystical reality in which the self and all of life are affirmed, and an existential reality of self-conscious alienation, suffering and death, a reality made bearable by compassion.

Blair Mountain Press, 2003

ISBN  0-9666608-7-0

Edwina Pendarvis is completely in the present but concerned with history, completely compassionate but tough with the clear-eyed truth, completely local but a citizen of the world. I trust this poetic voice and this vision which sees deeply into the life of the Appalachian world, human and animal, and sometimes, the divine.
        Irene McKinney, West Virginia Poet Laureate
        and editor of Backcountry: Contemporary Writing
        in West Virginia (West Virginia University Press, 2002)

Blair Mountain Press, 1999

ISBN  0-9666608-0-3

The Silence of Blackberries is the fifth volume of poetry by Victor Depta. The poems are a mystical exploration of nature and the self at the end of our millennium. "What is common in bliss," says the poet, whose subject is not the great spectacles of nature, the Rockies or the Grand Canyon, but the creeks and hills of West Virginia and Tennessee. The poet describes that natural world--its small valleys and streams, its trees and flowers, insects and weeds--but does so with a mystical perspective. That world is integral to the universe, which is unitary and holy, and the poet becomes aware of that unity and holiness through quiet meditation. As the poet says, "the peaceableness which, once again, claims me, achingly, with the question of the silence of blackberries."