Valentines and Forgeries, Mirrors and Dragons

James McGrath says, "This collection comes with contented clarity and confusion and a healthy spirit for experiencing the world with a semblance of evolving wisdom and losses to be reincarnated." McGrath is a wanderer about the Earth, frequently straying about Greece, Ireland, Japan and other mythically-related lands in search of Valentines, Forgeries, Mirrors and Dragons. James is a poet, artist and teacher. He lives in an old adobe house in the traditional village of La Cieneguilla, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is known for his narrative poetry in the KAET/PBS American Indian Artist Series of the 1970s: Charles Loloma, Allan Houser, R.C. Gorman, Helen Hardin, Lonewolf and Morning Flower, and Fritz Scholder. His poems have been published in nineteen anthologies. His collections of poetry, "At the Edgelessness of Light," "Speaking with Magpies" and "Dreaming Invisible Voices," are published by Sunstone Press. JAMES McGRATH was creative writing instructor and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in the early 1960s. He spent twenty years teaching and as Arts and Humanities Coordinator for the Department of Defense Overseas Schools in Europe and the Far East. He was Poet-artist in Residence with the US Information Service, Arts America, in Yemen, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Republic of Congo in the 1990s. James regularly attends the Listowel Writers' Week in Listowel, Ireland, and has worked with Natalie Goldberg, Joan Logghe, Sharon Olds, David Whyte, Mark Doty, Marjorie Agosin, Alastair Reid, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne.