Barbara Schmitz

"In JUST OUTSIDE, Barbara Schmitz sings of earth and sky, home and travel, youth and dying, in poems that range widely with humor, sadness, and surrealism, and with an over-arching love for all life. She urges us to 'Become a strong/silent tree with/ swaying branches/ in life's sweet breeze.' In spite of her claim 'It is only a rehearsal/ fpr her life in the alternate universe,' Schmitz pays close attention to this one, in poems ascending firmly into the heart of joy."

-Twyla M. Hansen, former Nebraska State Poet

What Bob Says (Some More) is about pleasure and delight, talking and listening/not listening, sex on the porch, being right, giving up, God, hearts and wings, yogurt, books, sirens, red/blue ambulance lights, happily ever after.

In these frank, open-hearted, sometimes very nicely funny poems, we are given many glimpses of a fully lived life. Barbara Schmitz moves with ease among the many elements that make up the world she values; her emotional directness pleases, her honesty reaches into us, her sometimes even ecstatic casualness surprises. "The blooms on the dahlias are holding back. / Don't they know withholding love's / the only sin to be punished in eternity. / Burst open! Be wanton! Don't wait!" Such a clear readable poet; such a fresh presence among us.

Author and poet Barbara Schmitz offers a heartfull, funny, and deeply moving "spiritual autobiography" that brings the reader along on each stage of her fervent inner quest for mystical experience. Beginning with a Catholic girlhood in Nebraska, she graduates to an unlikely apprenticeship with Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute; a dedicated transcendental meditation practice; and finally to thirty years of joys and struggles with a Sufi teacher (Shahabuddin Less with whom she travels to Bali, Turkey, India, Kashmir, and the Holy Land.
Incisive as lightning-the meaning of her Sufi name, Vajra-her questions and yearnings are our own, and she doesn't let God, her teacher, or herself off the hook.

Bob may seem impossible to anyone who doesn't love him. He's opinionated, eccentric, loud, and argumentative. And yet he's also caring, generous, funny, creative, spiritual, intelligent, helpful, enthusiastic, energetic-and often maddening in more ways than one can name. By the end of this chapbook, Bob has become as real as your crazy uncle, It takes all kinds to make a successful marriage.
Phil Wagner Editor of Iconoclast

“Barbara has a huge mind—it took her a long time on her own arduous path to capture its extent from ground to heaven. But never fear, she was Midwesterner—she stubbornly continued until the paper reflected her true self... she launched a rocket all the way to eternity.”

Winner of 2005 Nebraska Center for the Book Poetry Award

“These are tough, seasoned, well-grounded poems from a poet who has earned her authority by grounding herself in the reality of her language, subject matter, and craft.”

“The poems in this book are about her parents’ aging and dying, but on a deeper level, they are also about seeking release from the body’s limits.” “. . . how we relate to the world around us, what are lives mean, what will happen when we die.”

In April 2002 Sufi Murshid Shahabuddin David Less and a small group of students journeyed to Jerusalem and other parts of Israel to meet with spiritually-based peace workers to pray and to dance for peace. This book is a collection of events, people (Israeli and Palestinian), and responses to the suffering and joy of the war-torn land.