The Story

Hello, I'm Martin Turner, the author of these poems. They came to me in the summer of 2009 while I was waiting for other things to happen. I had written a poem inspired by the Eight of Cups many years earlier, and although the idea of writing more Tarot-inspired poetry had crossed my mind from time to time, it never seemed very compelling, and I certainly never imagined writing a poem for every card. But with time to kill, I started doodling, and before I knew it, the muse had grabbed me by the hair and was holding my nose to the grindstone, with the happy result that these seventy-eight poems were completed in slightly less than two months. Some of them came easily and are little changed from their original form, while a few resisted any fixed form whatsoever, demanding revision after revision, refusing to remain as they were. Some may still not be finished.

In each of the poems, I try to distill just one of the many possible interpretations of the corresponding card. While I trust that experienced users of the Tarot will recognize something familiar in most of them, I also hope that at least a few will be surprising, perhaps revealing a new aspect of an old familiar face. My fondest hope is that long-time practitioners will find them useful, and that readers who may have only a passing acquaintance with the Tarot will be inspired to delve deeper into its mysteries.

The card images that accompany the poems are derived from scanned images of an early edition of the Tarot deck drawn by Pamela Colman "Pixie" Smith, in collaboration with Arthur Edward Waite, and published in 1909 by Rider and Sons publishing company in London. They are NOT based on, or in any way derived from the so-called Rider-Waite Tarot (TM) deck which was published in 1971 by U. S. Games Systems, Inc. That company claims a copyright on a particular coloration of the original images. The images used here incorporate my own enhancement of the rather drab coloration on the 1909 deck, which is unambiguously in the public domain under U. S. copyright law.

As of this writing (September, 2010) I have a self-published book of the poems only (without the card images) for sale. I am also working on getting a card deck printed that has a poem on each card. Eventually, I hope to develop several different products that merge the poems with modified and enhanced images, but that will depend on how the book sells, so if you like the poems and would like to see them published in more artistic forms, please buy the book. Right now, the only way to purchase the book is to contact me personally by email-- martin(at)tarotpoems.com--but as time and resources allow, I will upgrade the site to allow items to be purchased directly online. Please be patient with me, as I'm new to all of this and it may take awhile to make it happen.

Thank you for your interest.

Martin Turner