Night Fires is a collection of poems birthed by the power of creating that lives in all of us - but some people are called to that art through an unstoppable presence that compels expression. That presence I call Night Fires, primarily because for me that urgency awakens me at night when dreams have formed the essence of expression in the dark of the psyche, bringing forth the rhythms of thought demanding form.

As such, Night Fires is the essence of the cycle of life: birth and death, birth and death. It is life ever beginning, death transforming it, and life giving it new form again. The cycle is continuous.

The subjects of poetry are both personal and universal and found primarily in the human knowing Carl Jung named "the collective unconscious," which contains archetypes that are universal mental predispositions not grounded in experience, existing independently and known directly by the mind, occurring in all cultures in some form.

Critics of this philosophy object to it primarily because it is "difficult to test scientifically," as if human thought, desire, fear, faith, love, hate can be placed under a microscope. I believe in the "soul of humanity" that connects us all to one another; therefore, I write about things I "know," communicating the human experience that belongs to no one race, no one culture, no one country, but to us all. All of creation is connected. I believe that all life exists now-those who have died, those who live, those yet to be born exist now-and that the answers to all things exist now. We simply have to search to discover those answers.

The human self knows right from wrong. We know when we have chosen one or the other. We know who we are by those choices. We know our form and substance and we are all in need of more consideration to refine our very beings to be a more perfect form. Poetry can give us insight into doing exactly that.

About the Author

Anne Marie Erskine lives with her husband Jim in Prescott, Arizona. She has a Master of Arts in the Humanities from The California State University and has published three other books of poetry titled Shadow Dance, Insight, and Unwrapped.