Seventy-Two Labors

Seventy-Two Labors, a metaphor for the interconnection of all lives, sentient and insentient, could easily be titled Seventy-Two Astonishments. Poet and Zen teacher Susan KōDō Efird marshals the ordinary and extraordinary elements of our lives to send her readers in ever-expanding, ever-deepening directions. The book's three sections deliver imagination and compassion unbounded: a long poem about a radiant pot "awake on the stove;" short lyric poems in Song Cycles; and a final poem about a morning walk around her neighborhood and the Milky Way that carries us home. Humor and gratitude, shattered innocence, and reverence infuse the whole.