Slender Volumes, Richard von Sturmer, Spoor Books, 2024

17. Xiangyan’s Great Enlightenment

For centuries cutlery was kept higgledy-piggledy in a wooden box with knives scratching forks and forks jabbing spoons. Then, during the Age of Enlightenment, this situation changed with the invention of the cutlery drawer. Knives, forks and spoons could now live peacefully in separate compartments. Hands no longer ran the risk of being cut or pricked when reaching for a desired utensil. Some believed this to be progress, others were not so sure.

19. “Ordinary Mind is the Way”

When my glasses become dirty, I reach for a cloth to wipe them clean. When my mind turns dull or distracted, I go outside and study the clouds. How many clouds can fit inside my skull? A whole sky-full! You could pack them in like stuffing a cushion. I shake my head – this is too fanciful. The clouds today, in the clear blue sky, have flexed their cloud muscles and are moving at a leisurely pace high above the trees and houses.

261. Yunmen Composes a Verse

It’s like you’re standing in the ocean and you feel the pull of a big wave and know that you have to write. Then the wave breaks over you and everything is just fragments of surf and billows of sand. No verse could be composed, certainly none by Yunmen. And the pull is always there; it draws you away from your desk, scatters your papers and lets the words wander by themselves, shedding their letters, one by one, as you enter unknown territory.

Reading this collection is to savour the gift of slowness, a slowing down to absorb the world, the things we hear see smell feel, back in the past, here in the present. And yes, it becomes a form of slow travel, reading these 300 poems, strengthening feet on the ground, hearts and minds set to uplift. Yes. Reading this exquisitely crafted collection is to travel with roadmap still in the pocket, to fall upon egg-whisk clouds in the sky hot water bottle Buddha Plutarch Dante a washing machine coffee with a drop of milk. It is to travel to Bologna Sydney New York Venice Poor Knights Islands Honolulu Auckland Mount Wutai Yumen Gate.

For me it is neither source nor destination but the travel itself. I am falling into the utter joy of writing and reading as travel. As discovery surprise wonder. A world in ruins and a world in repair. Richard is translating the koan within his own time and place, his own narrative, and I find myself doing this I read.

And that is what poetry can do. This book. These poetic vibrations, these wisdoms. Openings. Autobiography. Meditations. Poetry as an intimately and intricately woven cloth of both experience and imagining. Personal. Resonant. Anchored and anchoring.

The readings

’99. Layman Pang’s Stringless Lute’

‘105. The Hands and Eyes of Great Compassion’

Richard von Sturmer is a writer, performer and filmmaker who is well known for having written the lyrics to Blam Blam Blam’s “There is No Depression in New Zealand”. He is a teacher of Zen Buddhism and the co-founder of the Auckland Zen Centre. Slender Volumes is his tenth collection of writings.

Spoor Books page