The Heart of the World

Heart of the World, is a perfect example of the well written memoir in poetry form worthy of any poetry lovers attention. Jim Christy, a true road scholar, is the master of biographical hyperbole. The stories he tells of the people he meets, on the journeys he has taken, woven through his peripatetic life are astonishingly well written. Every word is true except for those that are not. This book, Heart of the World, deserves your applause Jim Chrisy.

In this fine collection of poetry, Heart of the World, we get to know Jim Christy in the various guises he has employed over the years: tramp, journalist, private eye, explorer, carnival roughie, or just plain old vagabond doing what vagabonds do best. His wanderlust has involved him in bizarre extremes, risking life and limb in the process, such as a month in a Cartagena dungeon, nearly being macheted in the Honduran rainforest, and the first foreign witness to the horrors of the Umtali massacre, describing the aftermath in his familiar has all led to his uncompromising style. Unsurprisingly for a legatee of Beat, the influences of jazz rhythms and cadences on the forms and structures of Christy's work are here in abundance.