Maitreyabandhu - Böcker

Yarn is about the stories we tell. Collected around four dramatic monologues - Hanoi Journal, The Cattle Farmer's Tale, The Travellers from Orissa and Aaron's Brother - Yarn includes an extended sequence of elegies, an account of a Warwickshire childhood and two stories about the Buddha. Ranging from the Holocaust to ancient India, from Kabir to modern Vietnam, using free verse, rhyme, prose poem and blank verse, Buddhist priest Maitreyabandhu's new collection is a vivid and at times disturbing account of the world we live in and the history that shapes us. His first book-length collection, The Crumb Road (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was widely praised.

After Cézanne is a sequence of fifty-six poems exploring the life and work of the post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. Reimagining his friendships with Zola and Pissarro, his impact on Matisse and Picasso, as well as his posthumous reputation, Maitreyabandhu celebrates Cézanne’s apples and card players in poems at once tender, urgent and amused. The book includes 26 colour reproductions, a preface by Christopher Lloyd (Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, 1988-2005) and extensive textual notes. After Cézanne is Maitreyabandhu’s third collection.

In a commonplace book, you’d write a recipe, copy a proverb, jot down housekeeping advice, making a precious object out of ordinary things. Maitreyabandhu’s Commonplace Book, his first book-length poem, follows a year from the death of his Buddhist teacher while he navigates his own spiritual life and smarts at lost love. Part epyllion, part diary, it mingles tradition with innovation, comedy with tragedy, traversing the bardo between this life and the next. Maitreyabandhu is a Buddhist teacher and writer. His first book-length collection, The Crumb Road (2013), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was followed by Yarn (2015) and After Cézanne (2019).

Maitreyabandhu's thematically varied debut collection includes poems of spiritual transcendence as well as meditations on love, memory and sexuality. Sometimes comic, often elegiac, the poems convey the pleasures and terrors of childhood as well as the mystical world of fable. Truthful, tender, and written with a kind of wonderment, the collection culminates in 'Stephen', an extended sequence of poems exploring a clandestine, and finally tragic, relationship between two boys. For Maitreyabandhu - a Buddhist teacher and member of the Triratna Buddhist Order for over twenty years - The Crumb Road is an image for the unreliability of memory, and for the vital thread of human value that connects us to the spiritual world.

In this eight-week course on mindfulness, Maitreyabandhu gently guides readers, teaching them how to pay closer attention to their experience. Each week, he introduces a different aspect of mindfulness - such as awareness of the body, feelings, thoughts and the environment - and recommends a number of easy practices; from trying out a simple meditation to reading a poem. Featuring personal stories, examples and tempting suggestions, "Life with Full Attention" provides both a starting point and a great reference.

Building on the success of his Life with Full Attention: A Practical Course in Mindfulness, Maitreyabandhu here offers a challenging but profoundly useful work on how to practise Buddhism in everyday life. Drawing on examples from the life of the Buddha, as well as weaving in astute references to poetry and art, Maitreyabandhu gives an easily understood outline of the system of spiritual life as undertaken by Buddhists in the Triratna Community. The journey starts with our own mind, particularly when we begin to look into the truth of things - the truth of the old man on the escalator, the friend in hospital, the coffin we help carry to the graveside. What we find in our guide, the Buddha, is a man with a 'fit' mind: a healthy, happy, non-neurotic, honest-to-goodness mind. To get fit, we need to work on becoming a happy healthy human being. We need to integrate our thinking faculty with our emotions. We need to wake up to thought and tune in to direct experience. And we need to work against the ever-rising tide of trivia, dissipation and overstimulation of the modern world.Maitreyabandhu takes us on this journey with practical week-by-week exercises, focusing on cultivating mindful awareness, being happy, integrating and simplifying our lives, knowing ourselves and truly being ourselves.