O, Beautiful End: Memorial Poems

"O, Beautiful End gives poignant, delicate and personal consideration to individuals who have died, yet transcends the particulars and extends to all deaths... these poems are Buddhist teachings as well as tributes," says Anne Waldman in her foreword to this first book by Zen teacher Geoffrey Shugen Arnold Sensei. This moving collection of memorial poems is both celebratory and elegiac, eloquent in its attempt to express the ineffable, full of rich and subtle detail yet universal. But as beautiful and evocative as these poems are, their real power lies in their ability to give voice to the most fundamental questions about the nature of impermanence, of life and death, delusion and enlightenment. And in doing so, they indeed fulfill Shugen Sensei's wish that they may "offer something worthwhile for [our] own living and dying, here, today."