On Paulann Petersen's Understory

Understory
by Paulann Petersen
Lost Horse Press
Sand Point, Idaho
www.losthorsepress.org
ISBN 978-0-9883166-2-1
2013, 182pp., $21.95

At more than 180 pages, Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen’s new book, Understory, offers readers an uncommon heft and promise in nine sections. As its opening poem suggests, it remarkably makes and remakes “a voyage of ascent.”

Two principles govern these poems. One is attention; the other is community. Reading these poems inculcates those principles, those habits – habits which would make any of us better people if we took them to heart. Attention encourages connection, and community requires it. Thus a good number of these poems begin in steady, patient observation, as in “Be a leaf, learn / to eat with your skin, / swallowing sun’s rankness / wherever it strikes you” – the opening stanza of “Synesthesia.”

What’s so modestly but surely pleasurable in this example is the surprise from line to line. What can you learn if you’re a leaf? Sunlight would be an obvious answer. The poem offers, however, how to “eat with your skin.” Oh, yes, I see – that’s one way to describe photosynthesis. This sort of surprise (surprise being always the antithesis of cliché) comes from a sure and unforced speaking voice as well as from a writer of uncommon perception, one who also knows how to elect lining and pace accurate to the material and the effects she seeks. Here’s the last stanza of that same short poem: “Savor light, that mother / to every sweetness. / Become the bee’s green sister, / the one who can taste / this world with her hands.” Sometimes just a preposition can make all the difference, as here, in the difference between what we might expect – a bee tasting the world on her hands – and what the poem gives us – a bee tasting the world with her hands.

Petersen also knows that appearances can be deceptive and that most of the time a larger and often invisible complexity informs them. Thus, in “Shape-Shifter,” the speaker sees and meets the mother of a woman getting married. The bride’s mother “wears her long gray hair pulled away / from her bone-shadowed face…” and she says to the speaker “Kate is my daughter.” Only later does the speaker learn that this woman was once a man, “her father, / now a woman,… / changed as a shaman might change / to be able to step near the spirits / without frightening them away.” Indeed, these poems also carry this same wish – to be able to observe and stay in patient questioning of what one sees – to try often to step near the spirits without frightening them away.

While Understory is a large book, its division into nine sections effectively mediates what might be a somewhat daunting first impression. Section II, for example, makes a sequence of poems invoking a girl’s memory of her parents: “I’m still that girl / hungry for her father’s talk,” and finding it, finding him “caught on a minute of shining / magnetic tape. On the wide-cast / net of longing” as this father’s voice speaks of how, once, he and other hired hands rode ponies “strung a Montana river,” dragging a net “behind them / through snow-melt, / seining for fish.” Nostalgia informs these poems, yet they’re also tinged with something akin to disbelief, a wonder that how what is gone is not gone, not quite, perhaps not at all. How does this work, ask the poems in this section. How does story-telling (a mother telling a story of her daughter, for example, when you’re the daughter, as in “Perspective”) – how does this speaking the past back into the present, how might this action make identity and, perhaps, wisdom? How does it hold something as slippery, valuable, and elusive as love’s tenderness, unselfishness, comfort, vividness, ache, and grief?

Even a brief discussion of Understory such as this is must include this book’s broad sweep of country and culture, as, for example, in part 4, titled “Shimmer and Drone.” Here we read poems based in an experience of India, a place quite different in history, culture, and weather from Paulann Petersen’s Pacific Northwest.

For a writer steeped in observation of landscape, such travel must offer daily and arresting experiences of what has not been known before. Even the moon looks different: “…upturned, / filling a late dusk’s violet-blue. / It’s a calligrapher’s single stroke / for and, and that curving sweep / from the Arabic pen -- / the word that’s written before all others, / a symbol that beckons us / to listen” (in “Beginning with And”). Here and in other poems like this one, Petersen the Northwesterner, Petersen the American, engages cultures deep with historical record, making her poems acts of encounter with what is other and sacred, from beggars to statues to an unfamiliar humidity and warmth. Here, as everywhere in this book, a fiercely deep curiosity works insistently to orient itself in settings at once unfamiliar and hence the opposite of mundane: "... A story begins with And. / Because it has never / ended, will never have to end." ("Beginning with And")

Paulann Petersen is now in her second term as Oregon Poet Laureate. Many of the poems in this book depend on and work from this Northwest locus. But finally, Understory becomes a book large with – and informed by – a keenly attentive generosity that transcends the regional. In terms of landscape, the book takes readers to Oregon, certainly, but also to places in India, Greece, and Turkey, to the paintings of Renoir (themselves their own places), and always to places of attention, places of the spirit, and to experiences that might (as the poem “Mechanistics” phrases it) “Be our answer / to what we believe we need, / be what we design.”

On The Geese at the Gates

The Geese at the Gates
by Drucilla Wall
ISBN 978-1-907056-59-8
Salmon Poetry (Ireland), €12.

Waking next to a lover (and, it would seem, then waking that lover), the culture (can one call it that?) of Kansas football, how to feel (if not be) invisible, time’s losses and the pathos of diminished places against the pleasures of Irish new ones, the large-scale sense of chance or possibility shutting down, “small actions, lives touched” – Drucilla Wall knows these and many other things, as her book The Geese at the Gates readily attests.

Though these poems range across the globe – from Canada to the aforementioned Kansas to Nebraska, Yellowstone Park, to St. Louis, to the Ireland of Enniscorthy and The Burren – they remain united by a consistency of voice and the inclination to story. They can be fruitfully and pleasurably read as a sort of unhurried checking-in: what does Drucilla Wall have to say today? Thus this book does not so much make one narrative or accumulate a single set of focused concerns as it does make, poem by poem, a sense of human company: a visitor in the house, someone you can count on to say something smart, well-considered, and not necessarily what you expect. One poem might talk about the speaker’s son, Michael, another about a dog, then one about a painting or a spider or a cat.

Yet the variety of subjects paints a consistent ambition to talk back to the clutter and rush that now seems inevitable in contemporary western life. Perhaps this rush and clutter is at least as old as Thoreau? In any case, Wall’s poems seek to carve out a space in which thoughtfulness might get itself worked out, a space in which genuine feeling might declare itself. Sometimes it’s merely a moment, one, say, in which a hiker confronted by a bear remembers “how close to God he felt / in the wilderness, how he hadn’t planned this hike / until the ranger called the area off limits…” So he hikes, and finds the exact closeness he’d hoped for, a mama bear “reared to full height, her cubs / crashing in the brush.” What’s so interesting about this poem is how it ends. This hiker, as Wall imagines him, registers not so much fear as a recognition of what he’s risking at that moment: “As she [the bear] considered him and began to bellow, / he remembered his loveable, fat-assed son, / left asleep and alone back at the camp, / thirteen years old and awkward as a duck on skis.” No pulling of punches here. And that’s it: the poem ends with “awkward as a duck on skis.”

That last image is not expected – and made more delightful as a result. What began as a hike towards some elemental truth becomes a reminder about the obligations of family connection and the risk of a thoughtless narcissism. The poem doesn’t push this agenda; it does not baldly announce. Rather it makes a space in which, in the moment of the poem’s action (surely not more than a few seconds), a flawed character reacts convincingly. We don’t have to be confronted by a bear; all we have to do is read “Trail Closed, Yellowstone.”

The great majority of poems in The Geese at the Gates work in just this way: they focus attention on something, and then in smart, well-constructed, humane ways, they repay a reader’s attention. Thus, they can serve as an example of what one sort of reading, at its best, might enact. A well-spoken speaker – someone canny, intelligent, sympathetic, unpredictable, critical, balanced – makes (or invokes) via language a presence based in intelligent, idiosyncratic regard. Such work rewards readers who bring similar a similar regard to their reading. In some odd way, this compact between work and reader enacts one kind of ideal human relationship. The best and fullest expression on the page asks from us those same qualities as we read – if the writer does her job, if the reader can manage to do the same.

The Geese at the Gates is not a poetry of ecstasy or religious fervor, nor does it seek to create some mythic reality. Rather, to borrow a phrase from Czeslaw Milosz, these poems stay “loyal to reality” as they attempt to describe, examine, and consider it.  Their comment, thoughtfulness, and perspectives make for rich rewards.

Robert Wrigley in the UK

The Church of Omnivorous Light

Bloodaxe Books

ISBN 978-1-85224-966-3

223p, £12.

If you live in the US, it takes a determined effort to read anything of contemporary UK poetry.  Writers like Wendy Cope, Lavinia Greenlaw, Gillian Clarke or John Burnside, widely published and acclaimed in the UK, lack (so far) any U.S. publishers.  The reverse is not so true.   Both Faber and Bloodaxe regularly publish U.S. writers, often first in selected volumes.  So it is that Robert Wrigley, Midwesterner by birth but staunchly Western by long habitation, has reached a place in his career where Bloodaxe Books (of Tarset, Northumbria, UK) has published for UK distribution his selected poems, The Church of Omnivorous Light (2013). 

What UK readers might make of Wrigley’s narrative music must really, of course, be left to UK readers, though one notes immediately that Church carries a Poetry Book Society (London) Special Commendation.   But it seemed like an interesting idea to take Church along in the suitcase as I traveled in the UK, and so it has proved. 

One senses that UK readers – particularly those from Wales and Cornwall – would recognize immediately the mining references in the book’s second poem, “From Lumaghi Mine”: “Dear Father, / Eleven days without sunlight.  We go in / in the black morning fog, work, and come out / having missed it all.  But we begin to appreciate the dark.”  UK readers would, I speculate, recognize, too, the unflinching attention of “Coroner’s Report,” which in its imagery treats the human body as both geology and flesh.  And though “Lull” seems to report the effects of a near tornado, it could almost as easily be read as a new incarnation of Keatian observation applied to a cracking September storm in the UK north: “Wind piled husks at the door / and made us sleepy. / Sacks of onion hung from the cellar beams / like scrota and swayed -- / or stood still while we did.”

Wrigley’s American influences (Frost, Dickey, Warren, Hugo) may not necessarily be uniformly well known to UK audiences.  But should a UK reader go back far enough – to Wordsworth’s Prelude with its emphasis on “spots of time” (moments of intense experience that carry within them large import), then Wrigley’s work would certainly be seen as consistent with this broad tradition.  For early or late in this book, Wrigley’s poems are frequently small masterpieces of storytelling.  Often they invoke questions surrounding mortality.  Here’s an early example, from “Majestic,” the title referring to “The only word for it, his white Lincoln’s arc / from the crown of the downriver road / and the splash it bellied in the water.”  Thus begins a story of a car that has evidently sailed off a road, killing its driver.  And a much later example, “Triage,” in which the speaker works to save a well-loved tree that a weight of snow has split: “…I tied it off to a stouter tree // winched it upright again, braced it with a two-by-four / plank notched and swaddled at the notched end / in innertube ribbons, then guyed it off to the fir / that was to be the engine of its reascension.” 

Neither “Majestic” nor “Triage” ends with any sort of summing up.   Neither the speaker nor the reader of “Majestic” understands why that car and driver took short flight off the road and landed in the river.  A suicide?  A momentary lapse of attention?  A medical crisis in the seconds before?  No answers.  And in “Triage,” does the split tree survive its crisis?  Again, the poem doesn’t say.  So the moments, while intense and fraught, remain unclear as to their implications.  Rather they become more valuable for the questions they evoke and make sharper.  Wordsworth might have done more interpreting for us, but the impulse to (paraphrasing him) “recollect in tranquility” remains evident and foremost.

While Wrigley’s subjects are never trivial, it may be that the music of his lines offers the larger frequent, consistent pleasure.  In the earlier examples quoted, it’s hard not to love the use of “swaddled” to refer to the wrapping of a tree.  And in “Majestic,” that car “and the splash it bellied” seems exactly apt to the picture it means to make.  Wrigley takes pains with his descriptions and listens attentively to his own ear (“the engine of its reascension”).   In doing so, he honors and elevates a reader’s attention.

UK readers might find in this book at least this striking contrast: The Church of Omnivorous Light consistently features poems that originate in a distinctly Western American sense of landscape.  Wrigley’s poems are often deeply sensitive to the vagaries of this landscape and its animal inhabitants.  His poems take for granted a backdrop that UK readers might struggle to recognize – a backdrop of landscape and ecosystem left mostly to itself.  

Such landscape and its assumptions underpin the book’s title poem, which centers in the “fundamental squawking [of] / little Pentacostal magpies, diminutive / raven priests” who are making a considerable fuss over what the poem’s speaker notes is merely that “Someone’s gutted out a deer is all.”  And this same sense of residence in a landscape alive with the wild also informs “Art” – another poem in which that wildness (again in the form of a deer) has tangled itself in a barbed wire fence: “He must have hit it full tilt in the dark, / momentum spinning him through / and in, every thrash thereafter / sawing flesh, by the time I arrived, / just past dawn, sawing deeper than bone.”  Wrigley’s west is often imperiled, making poems like “The Church of Omnivorous Light” and “Art” register as eulogies for a wild neither fully wild nor fully disappeared.  

The American West offers wide skies, a few mostly undomesticated wilderness areas, often considerable distances between population centers of any size, wide roads, and a cultural history that’s more veneer than solid plank.  The island of Britain, in contrast, offers sometimes similarly wide skies, frequently narrow roads and streets – sometimes made narrower by cars parked with one set of wheels on the road and the other off – a landscape of relatively dense human habitation even in rural areas, and a cultural history that, for writers, stretches back at least to Beowulf, though it might better be said to begin with the first writer in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner: Geoffrey Chaucer. 

For all of that, UK readers familiar with Wordsworth, Hardy, or John Clare – or for that matter, Alice Oswald – will have, one suspects, little difficulty connecting with Wrigley’s images and varied music.  Rightly a winner of numerous awards, Robert Wrigley’s work will surely take its place as a continuing and formative influence on writers in the American West.  As writers and readers, we in the West are in his debt.  It’s at once gratifying and about time that his work now finds a wider readership in the UK and beyond.

from Grasmere

Wordsworth and Coleridge knew The Lakes as remote and sparsely populated, their beauty some ambivalent combination of rocky uplands too poor in soil to support more than sheep combined with long vistas, rapidly changing light, and a sense of the severe sublime. 

The Lakes are not now remote; it does not take days to arrive here: a dual carriageway takes cars from Penrith to Keswick.  But the landscape itself has not altered much.  The rocky ground still supports mostly sheep, and even now they may well outnumber the weekday, nontourist population.  The stone circle Keats referred to as "Druid" still commands its view, and most people still walk to it, as Keats did.  And the fells (mountains, hills, ridgetops) remain mostly bare except for grass and bracken, their silhouettes sharply lined against sky when they are not clouded.

Grasmere is (or was) the home, for a good while, of William Wordsworth.  The house (Dove Cottage) is larger than it appears from the now-paved road.  His barn adjoining the house is gone (it has become a side garden), and his view of Rydal Water has been blocked by a rather imposing pile of dark green Victorian lakeland slate.  But the stone floor he walked on is intact and functional, as are the stairs he and Dorothy (his sister) and Mary (his wife) and Sara (her sister) climbed.  The house has running water now -- not so in Wordsworth's time.  The Wordsworth Trust burns coal in two grates (two separate rooms), if it's chilly -- Wordsworth might more likely have burned peat, but peat is harder to get now than then.  One is guided through the rooms, told not to sit in any chair, for they date from Wordsworth's time, and the whole tour is at once brisk if not quite brusque.  Such are the demands of a tourist destination.

Better to walk the Coffin Trail that starts up the hill.   It's called the Coffin Trail because for years it saw the transport of coffins to the church in Grasmere.  One can still see resting stones used to set the coffin on while its bearers rested.  If one goes in reverse, starting from Grasmere's Town End, the trail goes to Rydal (the hamlet) and to Rydal Mount, Wordsworth's last and (by the standards of his day) luxurious home.  Alas, as Wordsworth moved from house to house, he wrote less and less of interest.  He seems to have known this and felt himself helpless to alter things.  One can speculate that some essential aspect of his imagination had been shut off at great cost, and once off it stayed off.  Perhaps this is what can come of leaving a wife and child in another country and pretending to oneself that they are no longer part of you.  Perhaps you simply wall off the imagination that would miss them and wonder about them.  That Wordsworth left a French woman he felt married to, and their child, and rarely acknowledged them afterwards is simply accurate.  The effects of all that can only be speculation.

Rydal Mount itself is now (and has for some time been) back in the hands of the Wordsworth family, who, one is told, occasionally still use the house themselves.  Many of their photographs and portraits are featured on the walls.  One can see where Keats left his note -- having planned to visit the great man, he arrived to find the house empty.  Wordsworth may not have been much of a writer of good poems while he lived in this house, but he was quite a landscape architect.  The gardens and grounds reflect his plantings and his design.  And one element of his writing while there -- his prose Guide to the Lakes -- is partly responsible for the entire area's development as a destination to visit.  Our afternoon there is rainy, with an occasional exclamation of sun to tease the sympathies.  It's still possible to see out Wordsworth's study window at the top of the house and quite easy to imagine being taken by the distraction of merely watching the weather change.

Anna Keesey's Little Century now out in paperback

Little Century
by Anna Keesey
Picador Books,
ISBN 978-1-250033369
If you've somehow missed Anna Keesey's wonderful novel of 19th century rangeland Oregon, now is the time to pick up Little Century in paperback. Keesey's novel takes its rightful place with Molly Gloss's flawless The Jump-Off Creek in its depiction of new-to-Oregon women.  Esther Chambers has lived eighteen years in Chicago.  After her mother dies, she heads West.  Carolyn See, of the Washington Post, proclaims that "Keesey’s words are clear as lake water"  -- and she's right.  The New York Times Book Review also gets it right: "Fluid and restrained prose, solid plotting, and a keen eye for detail."  It's a great read.

On Charles Goodrich's new book, A Scripture of Crows

A Scripture of Crows
by Charles Goodrich
ISBN 978-1-87885-163-5
Silverfish Review Press, 2013, $16.

Charles Goodrich’s A Scripture of Crows makes what its title suggests: a holy book of cloud, breath, creatures, thunderstorms and their mornings after, “the air scrubbed clean and all quiet // until some little clod of dirt / starts chirping for joy.” Thus is the grandeur of Genesis become birdsong at morning – in the right season neither distant nor rare.

As celebratory as the poems in the book often are, the real pleasure on offer here comes from tracing the motions of a nimble, inquisitive, bemused, sometimes laconic mind. Thus the distant relative in “A Distant Relative” is identified first as “A tiny pouch / with legs // and a wicked assortment of surgical tools in its mouth: / it’s a tick / clinging to my sock.” Later, “Its face / looks rather like a hole saw.” By the end of this poem (it’s only a page long), this tick has also been associated with “my great-aunt Aggie’s / great-great-uncle, / the family’s legendary / parasite …” It’s that word parasite that makes the link. So what starts out as a poem about finding a tick turns into a short disquisition on what it means to be a parasite. This meaning is not simple. Aggie’s great great uncle is a Civil War veteran, a man “who came home from Chancellorsville / toothless, emaciated, one-eyed, and crazy.” Unable to do any sort of work, he “just wandered the pastures all day / chanting poems to the sheep // and like this tick / he died young / and none of his poems survive.”

Goodrich’s central interest – one of them anyway – has to do with this paradox: nature is not thing so much as process, yet within a world of process and change, what stays, what survives? In a significantly degraded natural world, what survives is absence, as in the poem “Touched,” with its litany of absences: absence of geese, absence of bear and butterflies and the songbird “that no longer visits our town.” The poem’s title effectively works its own ambiguity: to be touched is one way of indicating some mental instability. It’s also a phrase registering emotional impact. In this second meaning, we usually refer to being touched by some act of kindness or generosity – we mean phrase as a part of giving thanks. As a writer, Goodrich knows and exploits all of this.

In a world defined by natural process, what also survives is just that: process. “Morning Song at Billy Meadows” traces the steps of a morning, always observing the outer world for traces or echoes or indications that somehow mirror or answer the human inner world. Or, in plain linguistic terms, this is a poem that keeps trying to place it’s “I” in relationship to all outside it – the flow of air, the “overnight rain,” grasses that “suffer the vanity of being plain,” house cricket and field cricket. The poem presents five short sections, each making some connection between “I” and the natural world, ending with section six: “And sometimes you realize / that the blood you gave to mosquito / is what makes the bluebird / so blue.” Though perhaps this claims a little bit too much literal credit for human blood, the point is clear enough and in its way comforting: we, too, have yet some part to play in this morning song.

Though this book never resorts to shrillness, and though it is much more frequently than not interested in correspondences and how metaphors communicate partial but significant truths, this book also carries a challenge in that it asks us to consider our own environmental impacts. But Goodrich construes “environmental” in the widest possible way. In these poems, the influences of family and friends also constitute environmental impacts. Thus a number of poems speak in celebration of various compatriots – gardeners, rock collectors, piano tuners, carpenters, fellow writers and readers who enrich a life. But given the characteristic close attention nature gets in a Charles Goodrich poem, it’s almost inevitable that this book must also include the sometimes sardonic, sometimes sarcastic, always troubled poems registering deep concern at the changes wrought by human technologies and our eagerness to alter natural processes for our own short-term benefit. Of these poems, “Ghost River” may be the most effective. It uses the trope of a dreamer who wakes only to discover a new dream: “I went to the sink and opened the tap. Clear water / spilled out, cool and fresh. It had all been a dream. The river was leaping with fish, muscled with joy. / I was so pleased. I was innocent. I was still asleep.”

In its entirety, A Scripture of Crows presumes, asserts, interrogates and articulates the human intellect’s bodily continuity with all the other sentient life on this planet – from Douglas squirrels to worms, scrub jays, centipedes, turkey vultures and to like-minded people. Most surely in intention and in fact this is a capacious form of love. His is a way of seeing the world as animate and rarely at rest. Within such a conception, even “those lumbering yellow road graders, / bulldozers, and belly scrapers” take on a wonderful quiet at night, “bedded down / in the moonshade of scorched oaks / like perfect beasts.” Within such a conception, this book asserts and often finds within daily life just that sense of wholeness and connection. The result, however, is perhaps as elusive as it is large and endlessly variable. As “Camped in the Olympics” puts it describing an evening’s “hilarious / silence” under stars, “It’s possible / I’ve never been so wholly / awake, but that laughing / isn’t me, it isn’t wolves, / and it isn’t loons.”