Description

 

Pink Tercets

by Rick Rayburn

Listen in on 15 minutes of Rayburn sitting alone with Clint Eastwood, or Jack Nicholson’s rattle of recoiling chain link, his Florsheim’s scrunching gravel. Experience mountain dogwood’s pink fall leaves, fording a Mendocino grassland terrace, the black silence of a species extinction, and smudge pots under orange groves’ blossoms. Sample dong po rou, a thousand-year-old Chinese dish served to Marco Polo and Spanish paella, simmered by drunken rockabillies.

Mostly narrative free verse, this collection also pushes poetic diversity with classic (pantoum, ghazal, haibun, cento, sijo) and modern forms (duplex, golden shovel) and ekphrastic poems. The voices of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie resonate in the cento, “I Heard the Song of a Poet” and “a voice come a-chanting,” and wonder what Mohammad Ali is hissing over a fallen Sonny Liston in the greatest American sports photograph.

Feel the dry Santa Ana wind, recall junior high school falling in love over fries and cherry cokes, and watch an Altadena childhood home turn to ash, charred brick and buckled steel. Contemplate spirituality, faith, and doubt floating on the Sea of Galilee and the opalescent water of San Pedro Bay.

 

Early Praise

Rick Rayburn’s latest collection is a charming balance of humor, wit, and love for all things nature. These artfully composed poems reveal profound observations of the environment and the human condition in a world we all share. From his reverence for the complex beauty of a tree in “Dear Mountain Dogwood” and its pink tercets, the title of this new book, to his admiration for the tiniest of creatures, or the wee deity from “Watering Cosmos,” these reflective, thought-provoking poems will stay with you as they explore and illuminate the ups and downs of daily living, with a keen eye, a touch of magic, and an unexpected dash of joy.

—Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas,  author of Handful of Stallions at Twilight

In Pink Tercets, Rick Rayburn simultaneously lifts and breaks our hearts with poems that celebrate nature’s intricate beauty while lamenting the damage our human thoughtlessness inflicts. Yet he grants grace in the face of human frailty. Rayburn also gives us poems of family and music and art, woven with strands of humility, remembrance, learning, and loss. From the purity of a dogwood’s leaf to avocados-as-ammunition, Rayburn’s vivid imagery and inventive descriptions are full of tenderness and humor.

—Linda Jackson Collins, author of Painting Trees

Pink Tercets is a collage of poems, each composed of vibrant images and imbued with the music of internal rhyme. This collage, these poems allow me to witness a man’s life journey. Created in the lexicon of love and sorrow, children and tall trees, lynx and Dylan, blood and oceans, woman and daffodils, the poetry of Rick’s words give entry into the delicate universe of human and spiritual intimacy.

—Leigh Jordan, Sonoma County Poet and Archeologist

 

About the Author

Rick Rayburn has lived most of his life in California, starting in the Los Angeles basin, then moving to Humboldt Bay, before settling in Sacramento. A fourth generation Angelino, Rayburn grew up in Altadena, and went to UCLA in the 1960s, where he met his future wife, Marianne. After two years in the Air Force in Tucson, he worked at the Coastal Commission as a redwood ecologist in Arcata, where he and Marianne had three children. After fifteen years on the North Coast, Rayburn move his family to Sacramento, turning his focus to land preservation as the Natural Resource Manager at California State Parks. For many years he helped direct the Board of Governors of Center for Natural Lands Management and Chaired Big Sur’s Santa Lucia Conservancy. Upon retiring, he began writing, becoming active in the Sacramento literary community. He has published two poetry books, Under the Overstory (2020) and Slack Tide (2023), poems in eight journals, and a Van Gogh royal crown sonnet.