About this book

Meditations on images and symbols of the tarot deck is not my original idea. Sherril Jaffe suggested this for a poetry workshop in February 1972, for which I wrote “Vision of a Sword.” The poems in this book are perhaps less mystical, and, since all the cards in the major arcana figure persons or at least symbolic characters, are mainly written in first person, more like monologues.

Illustrations in this book are from the major arcana of the tarot deck of Jean Dodal of Lyon, a classic tarot of Marseilles deck that dates from 1701-1715. Other versions of Le Bateleur, on the cover, are from the Milanese tarocchi, about 1500, the Oswald Wirth tarot deck of 1889, and the Rider-Waite tarot deck, 1909.

Links and shortcuts

In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.

Each entry in the contents links to the poem.
The title for a poem links back to the contents, highlighting the entry for the poem.
Words in the headers and footers link to the index, the chapter in the contents, a listing of books by the author, to this page, and to the previous and next poems in the book.
On this page, below, the word “Return” links to the page that you jumped from to get here.

You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).

Keyboard shortcuts for navigating this book
Context	Keys	Jump to / Behavior
cover	⌥ ◄	Books by Tom Sharp
	⌥ ▲	About Tom Sharp
	⌥ ►	about this book (this page)
	⌥ ▼	contents
	⇧ ⌥ ▼	contents
contents	⇧ ⌥ ▲	cover
	⌥ ▼	select the next item in the contents
	⌥ ▲	select the previous item in the contents
	⌥ ►	open the selected page
	⌥ ⏎	open the selected page
poem	⇧ ⌥ ▲	contents
	⌥ ◄	contents
	⌥ ▲	open the previous page
	⌥ ▼	open the next page
	⌥ ⏎	remove or restore colorization

The author

Tom Sharp is a Native American of Aleut heritage, a member of Seldovia Village Tribe. He is the author of numerous books, including Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose, Taurean Horn Press (ISBN 0-931552-10-9), a novel, Hans and the Clock (ISBN 979-8580172484), The book of science, SciFi (ISBN 979-8694935210), Things People Do (ISBN 979-8687425568), The book of beliefs (ISBN 979-8683553593), The I Ching (ISBN 979-8573510620), Images (ISBN 979-8577560515), Aleut Artifacts (ISBN 979-8575608998), Aleut Words (ISBN 979-8582103394), and First Nations (ISBN 979-8682924769).