Stone Nest

poems by Richard Collins

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In the tradition of the ancient Chinese poets who went to the mountains to be closer to nature and themselves, Richard Collins delivers these dispatches from his mountain retreat called Stone Nest in Sewanee, Tennessee. As a Zen monk, teacher, and abbot, Collins pays tribute and attention to the art of nature and the nature of art, always with a questioning sensibility that asks: what more do the voices of mountains and waters have to tell us? How can we listen to and truly see what is all around us? How can we live our lives with authenticity and daring, yet with compassion and concern for all beings, sentient or not? Stone Nest explores the seasons of the mind and its responses to the seasons of a particular patch of land and the journey one has taken in time and space to settle there. How do poetry and painting, philosophy and religion, sensation and memory distort and disclose the gifts of the natural environment? The title captures the kind of comfort we can expect when we make a rugged landscape our home and meditation hall.

PHILOSOPHY / Zen
POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-962082-99-0 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2025946466

Released September 23, 2025  |  Copyright 2025

124 pages

Author Biography

Richard Collins taught at universities in the United States, Wales, Romania, and Bulgaria before retiring as Dean Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at California State University Bakersfield. He spent a decade at Louisiana State University (where he was the first faculty advisor for New Delta Review) and a decade at Xavier University of Louisiana (where he edited the Xavier Review). He has been a Fulbright researcher in London and Fulbright senior lecturer at the Universities of Bucharest and Timişoara, as well as a Leverhulme Fellow in Wales. He has translated poetry from Romanian and books from French, including Taisen Deshimaru’s Autobiography of a Zen Monk (Hohm Press, 2022) and Philippe Coupey’s Zen Fragments: Teachings and Reflections of a Zen Monk in Paris (Hohm Press, 2024). He also edited Deshimaru’s Mushotoku Mind: The Heart of the Heart Sutra (Hohm Presss, 2012). His own books include John Fante: A Literary Portrait (Guernica Editions, 2000), No Fear Zen: Discovering Balance in an Unbalanced World (Hohm Press, 2015), and In Search of the Hermaphrodite: A Memoir (Tough Poets Press, 2024). Since 2016 he has been abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple and now resides in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he directs Stone Nest Zen Dojo.

Endorsements

“I suggest walking through the woods with these poems. Open at random and read a  poem to the  first rock that stands up to you, then open again and read to the loudest bird, then close your eyes and remember a verse from what you read to the bird, and imagine that you are in a field of black racers snakes. Do not panic: when you open your eyes again it will be evening and the air will be redolent of grasses being crossed by a myriad of lightning bugs. This book by a  Zen master collaborates with the nature it draws from, the mountain air and the changing winds. You will find that a human walks with you through the beauty and terror of the mountains, unafraid of being seen in all its frailty. You have a companion whatever the weather.”
—Andrei Codrescu, author of Too Late for Nightmares : New Poems (Black Widow Books)

“Stone Nest is more than a collection of poetry, it is a map for breaking free. At once complex and (seemingly) simple, Richard Collins’s poems are koan-like, are kusen, beautifully wrought meditations on how to break from illusion, instructing us to see and feel ‘the rhapsody of things as they are.’ This book is a field of consciousness where energy transfers from one poem to the next, and then back, and on again. It opens with a ‘shoreless river’ making its way through terrain of deep spiritual seeking, connecting, disconnecting, arriving at cicadas leaving their forms, and the ultimate ‘silent emptiness.’ This is profound and compelling work. The attention to form, image, language, space eases the reader into a meditative state, to ‘embrace the miraculous ordinary.’ If there is a ‘Samadhi of Words,’ then this book is exactly that.”
—clare e. potter, author of Healing the Pack and Nôl laith

“Stone Nest is a remote Tennessee mountaintop home where the speaker of these poems has retreated to live in harmony with nature and embrace ‘the everyday the / miraculous ordinary.’ Though he contemplates the ‘human hustle’ of those still seeking worldly success with Buddhist detachment, he cannot yet renounce two earthly attachments: poetry and love. The poems about his daughter stand out as especially beautiful and moving. Readers who cherish, as I do, the poems of the old Chinese masters and the more recent master Gary Snyder will sip the ink of these pages like a rare nectar.”
—Julie Kane, author of Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems

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