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The Stone
Joe Survant
Accents Publishing is proud to present The Stone by accomplished poet Joe Survant. Reading these new and selected poems is a form of travel, a spiritual experience, a pilgrimage to visible and invisible worlds. We hope you enjoy this book.
What Others Say About The Stone
The Stone: New and Selected Poems from Asia is another gift from Joe Survant's treasury. "The Jungle Letter To My Wife" begins colloquially enough—"There was something I wanted to say,". In the next stanza, a "strangler fig" appears (like Chekhov's Act I pistol) / whose slow aerial life / brings down the greatest tree." The pistol shot arrives 3 lines later: "the terrible secret / hummed unheard / within you, a seed / some wayward bird / dropped carelessly / in the warm bark high / up your body's tree." Survant's effortless, skillful joinery in this poem previews what's evident in every poem. No jungle splendor exists without terrors. Risk is the price of rapture. Survant reveals the journey, laid (like Snyder's Rip Rap) word by word, guiding us towards deep feeling and wisdom. I urge you to read this book.
—Peter Coyote, author, actor, Zen Buddhist Priest
Like snow falling in the rainforest, these poems are surprising, mysterious. They startle with images both strange and familiar, and let us travel to new places in both the world and the heart.
—Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Embarking from Malaysia where he taught in the mid-80s, Joe Survant's poems in The Stone resonate with the energy and insights of West meeting East, creating a travelogue of cultural and spiritual explorations that teach us that the world is wider and more diverse than we too often imagine it from the comfort of our couches and familiar neighborhoods. These poems teem with mystery and myth as Survant adroitly dispels the vague impressions most of us harbor of Southeast Asia. They give us what one of the poem's shamans describes as the "world without its skin," embodying universal truths from what for many of us is a new and alluring perspective. They offer a new dialect to the truths of suffering and spiritual transcendence that are at root our universal human language.
—Richard Taylor, author of Fathers
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Conversation with the Shaman
In the trees
away from the light
in the deep deep trees
inside the night
were your dreams good?
What did you dream
last night?
My soul leaped
with dreams
last night.
The man
with a sharp head
turned and leered
in the light.
Were your dreams good?
What did you dream
last night?
My soul roared with dreams
last night.
I looked the man
with a long tongue
in the face.
My body is sick
from the sight.
Were your dreams good?
What did you dream
last night?
My soul shook
with dreams
last night.
I saw the world
without its skin.
My body filled
with the height.
Were your dreams good?
What did you dream
last night?
My soul didn't
roam in dreams
last night.
It lay heavy
and thick
in the body's hut
last night.
Were your dreams good?
What did you dream
last night?
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Details and Ordering
Publication Date: February 15, 2026
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-961127-22-7
Price: $19.00
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About the Author
Joe Survant is Professor Emeritus at Western Kentucky University. He is the author of seven collections of poems, most recently, View from the Stork Building, from Larkspur Press. He is the winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize from the University of Arkansas Press and a recipient of grants from the Kentucky Arts Council, The Asia Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the NEH. Individual poems have been published in Malaysia, China, Japan, Singapore and the U.K., as well as in the U.S. He served as Kentucky's Poet Laureate 2002 – 2004.
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