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Tiferet – 2010

Issue 13

2010

Biannual

Sima Rabinowitz

Tiferet is an independent “multi-faith publication dedicated to promoting peace in the individual and in the world,” published six times annually (two print issues and four online issues). Issue 13 features five essays (most are excerpts from forthcoming or recently published books); three short stories; the work of a dozen poets; black and white photographs by Taoli-Ambika Talwar and a drawing by Israel Carlos Lomovasky. The large format is ideal for Talwar’s exceptional photographs, three images that couldn’t be more different from each other (a close-up of a blossom; a distanced view of a house in the woods; and a close-up of a wall of granite rock), except for the skill and creativity of their composition.

Tiferet is an independent “multi-faith publication dedicated to promoting peace in the individual and in the world,” published six times annually (two print issues and four online issues). Issue 13 features five essays (most are excerpts from forthcoming or recently published books); three short stories; the work of a dozen poets; black and white photographs by Taoli-Ambika Talwar and a drawing by Israel Carlos Lomovasky. The large format is ideal for Talwar’s exceptional photographs, three images that couldn’t be more different from each other (a close-up of a blossom; a distanced view of a house in the woods; and a close-up of a wall of granite rock), except for the skill and creativity of their composition.

Spiritual themes in the magazine can be overt or more indirect. Among the more overtly faith and-or-religion-oriented pieces are a book excerpt by Swami Kriyananda, “The New Path: My Life with Paramhansa Yogananda,” a memoir of study with a spiritual teacher; Aryeh Tepper’s, “Spiritual Evolution: The Rhythm of Genesis,” an exegetical essay; and Elisabeth Murawksi’s poem, “Pauline”:

She’s switched from her Sanskrit mantra
to the Jesus prayer. Set
her guru’s picture on fire.
But wavers over toys she bought
when she “thought she was a child”

More spiritual in overall sensibility, and less directly linked to faith or specific religious ideas or practice, are a poem Maria Mazziotti Gillan, “In These Green Mountains” (“In these green mountains, the music / of the universe is everywhere, / even I can hear it, like the sound I hear / in the moments before sleep”); a prose poem by j.p. dancing bear, “Some Might Bow Their Heads to the Sunset” (“what’s left of the sunset is one of the most divine lights you’ve ever witnessed: your mouth moving to one word: again and again”); an essay by Deborah DeNicola, “Cinderella Rocketing: Healing the Father with Creative Dreamwork,” a memoir about participating in a Dream Intensive Workshop; and the winner of the journal’s 2009 prose contest, “Center of the Universe,” by Richard P. Krepski, an excerpt from his forthcoming book in which Krepski proposes a model of the universe that is “an ever enlarging sphere.”

Despite a number of dark and difficult themes, Arelen Geller’s “Flight” is representative of the journal’s predominant impulses and tendencies:

Mooonbeam sheds its light
I grab a handful of stars

The golden grain leads me
To a field of dreams

Stirring crimson, gold and coral
We burst into flames

And in our creation we relish
A dance, a song, our voices lift

In flight, soaring
To the expanse of being

An existence outside the edges.

[www.tiferetjournal.com]

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