Two noted Maryland authors teamed up to produce Basilica, an intense collection of photography and poetry. George Miller and Donald Shomette view their subjects through a single lens. Theirs is a true collaboration, a process in which images and words intermingle and grow.
Basilica begins with the Baltimore Basilica as a sanctuary from the turbulent events of the 1960s. A desperate mother brings her shell-shocked son to the Sunday service hoping he might find peace after the trauma of Vietnam. "We're here, we're safe, no bombs, no guns, you're home."
Fifty-six poems and stories spread over seven sections lead the reader through decades along Maryland's western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
- SANDHILL CRANES - "The cranes descend, wings feathers brake, feet forward, one with the marsh, they land, dance, forage."
- BALANCE BEAM - "Know it, become it, feel the padded suede beneath your naked feet, the spring within the wood, the space above the beam."
- FLAT BOTTOMS, GOD BLESS'EM - "Master of tides snaking curlicue channels into the marsh, slithering back to the broad water."
- VIETNAM - "The wind blows warm from the delta at dawn, hot from the hill country at noon, sleep, dawn, direction fail me, time is forever noon and hot."
- A PALM BEACH BLESSING - "May the star in the east guide your petroleum engineers to oil deposits under the desert."
- ON READING JUNG'S SEVEN SERMONS TO THE DEAD - "Wings of the white bird hover over my hydrangea, incessant figure eights along serpentine garden paths strobe, stroke, beat."
Miller, George K.: - Award winning writer George Miller first served his country as an officer in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. His subsequent civilian career saw him engaged with the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, Lockheed Martin, and later as the CEO of his own computer software company. He began writing on the Maryland Area Rail Commuter (MARC) on his hour long commute from Western Maryland into the District of Columbia when he wrote to pass the time. Many of his stories and poems were "borrowed' from his fellow passengers who shared his third-rail existence between work and home. In his retirement he manages a small publishing company in Southern Maryland where he has facilitated books under several local imprints.His own books include The Best Free Verse Ten Dollars Can Buy (a book of poems), Cooper Finds Her Thermal as Told to George Miller by a Little Pink Bird (an illustrated allegory about an ecoterrorist Cooper's Hawk who sets out to save the Chesapeake Bay), and Loaded for Bear, Adventures and Misadventures from the Appalachians to the Chesapeake (a book of short stories).He owes much to his fellow writers at the Hyattstown Mill Arts Project, the Southern Maryland Poets Circle, the publishers at New Bay Books, the Southern Anne Arundel Arts Lab, his longtime collaborator Donald Shomette, and especially Elisavietta Ritchie for ten years in her monthly workshops at the Calvert County Library.
Shomette, Donald Grady: - Donald Grady Shomette is a nationally known maritime historian. For more than two decades he was a staff member of the Library of Congress. As a cultural resources consultant and marine archaeologist he has been engaged by myriad governments, universities and museums. As a researcher, writer and lecturer he has worked internationally under the sponsorships of the National Park Service, the National Geographic Society, the US Navy, and others. Author of eighteen books, and contributor to many professional journals, encyclopedias and anthologies of history, archaeology and poetry, his writings have also appeared in such publications as National Geographic, History and Technology, and Sea History. He is thrice winner of the prestigious John Lyman Book Award for Best American Maritime History, recipient of the Calvert Prize for historic preservation, and holds an honorary PhD from the University of Baltimore.
