Len Blanchard

Beach Synchronization: Selected Poems by Len Blanchard

Publisher Marketing: The sixty poems collected in Beach Synchronization are set either on the ocean, or on the beach, or in transit to or from the beach or, finally, in the mind of the narrator when he is simply thinking about the beach and the ocean. The first person narrator of these poems is the poet. This suggests what is indeed fact, that the poet has spent a great deal of time enjoying the many beautiful beaches along the west central Florida coast. However, while the beach is often beautiful, anyone who has spent any time near or on the ocean knows marine weather can be harsh, even life-threatening. Indeed, the beach is an arena where dramas of life and death are played out daily. To truly appreciate the shore and the ocean, then, one must respect the marine environment and the lessons it has to teach us. One must, in other words, be in synch with the various moods of the sea and nature. The poems herein are loosely organized around the premise that the moods of the sea and marine weather have their various rhythms. An overarching theme of the poems is that one who is in tune with the rhythms of marine life will find himself or herself in communion with a transcendent reality. In other words, one who is synchronized to the natural world is likely to feel that the world of the senses is not the only world. In many of the poems in this collection, the narrator is overcome with a premonition or an inkling that the world he knows with his senses provides evidence of a higher reality, a reality in which the significance of his human experience - whatever it has been -- will become fully clear and will be justified. Contributor Bio:  Blanchard, Len Blanchard earned a B. A. degree in English from Washington and Lee University in 1969 and a Ph. D. in English from Emory University in 1975. He taught English in North Carolina and Dallas before becoming employed for several years as a corporate trainer and, later, as a business and financial writer in Dallas and Little Rock. He is now an adjunct instructor in English at Manatee Community College, teaching composition and literature.