This Terrifyingly Exquisite Jolt: Quantum Poetry Vol. IV is available in paperback on Amazon.

This Terrifyingly Exquisite Jolt: Quantum Poetry Vol. IV serves as both epilogue and apogee, as origin story and culmination of the Quantum Poetry Series. It is the “jolt” that shatters fragmentation, offering poetry as a unifying language that bridges the former divides:

  • The inner and outer worlds (psyche and cosmos)
  • Art and science (rationality and imagination)
  • Self and the web of life (embodied ecosophy)

The essay reveals the poet’s journey to a cosmic home, where the individual is not separate but an active participant in life’s unfolding. It is significant because it completes the spiral of transcendence and inclusion: poetry as a tool for personal, cultural, and ecological regeneration.

Where the first three volumes are collections of poems, the fourth volume is a longer reflective essay which builds on and transcends the poetry to articulate a transcendent unity of existence, where feeling, reason, and imagination intertwine.

 

From “Trapped in the City” to “At Home in the Universe”

The mythopoetic pilgrimage began in the first volume of this series with the existential sense of alienation, separation, and being lost in the mechanized, urban landscape – trapped in the city – , now concludes with a celebration of being at home in the Universe. It is a return to the Source: a synthesis of the inner and outer worlds, where poetry, ecology, and spirituality merge into a unified aesthetic experience. The yearning for belonging in Vol. I has a become a nondual integration in Vol. IV: a cosmic homecoming.

Central to the essay is the exploration of the vertical axis of human experience, and a host of influences from Ken Wilber’s nondual integral approach to C.G. Jung’s individuation can be felt. There is more than a whisper of William Blake’s influence in the embrace of paradox and the restoration of the Imagination as the key to wholeness. Arne Naess’ ecosophy is equally present: there is no separation between self, nature, and cosmos. The essay and the poems referenced across the four volumes of the Quantum Poetry Series become a living system, expressing and regenerating the relational unity of all things.

The wide-ranging transdisciplinary essay quotes over 40 writers and thinkers from Iain McGilchrist and Christopher Alexander to Lyla June, Marie-Louise von Franz, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, from C.G. Jung and Walt Whitman to Michael Ende, Benoît Mandelbrot, Kenneth Grahame, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Bach, and J.R.R. Tolkien, from Helga Thoene, and George Hogenson to Jan Smuts, Alan Savory, Pamela Mang, Bill Reed, and David Orr, from Aldo Leopold and Leontino Balbo Jr. to Wendell Berry, Daniel Christian Wahl, Masanobu Fukuoka, and Zach Bush, from David Graeber and David Wengrow to Peter Kingsley, Charles Eisenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hesiod, Ovid, Dante Alighieri, Hermann Hesse, Mark Rothko, Anselm Kiefer, E.F. Schumacher, Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Thich Nhat Hanh, Seamus Heaney, and Tyson Yunkaporta.

 

Quantum Poetry is not just written but “lived into being”

This Terrifyingly Exquisite Jolt: Quantum Poetry Vol. IV holds space for the vertical ascent of consciousness and the horizontal embrace of life’s interconnectedness.

It has much to offer:

  • A response to cultural fragmentation, invoking a counter-tradition of depth, imagination, and wholeness.
  • A vision for the future, rooted in embodied sensitivity to the world’s patterns and potentials.
  • A call to agency, where the creative act becomes a sacred, regenerative offering to the world.

Quantum Poetry is not just written but “lived into being”—a profoundly significant achievement for anyone seeking to reconnect with the mysteries of existence.

 

This Terrifyingly Exquisite Jolt: Quantum Poetry Vol. IV is available in paperback on Amazon.