Neile Graham, THE WALK SHE TAKES

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THE WALK SHE TAKES, Neile Graham, MoonPath Press, 2019.

This morning I took a walk across Scotland—and across several centuries—with Neile Graham. She reminded me of something I was told when I visited Chartres Catheral: don’t travel as a tourist, but as a pilgrim. “Why did I leave my shore for another?,” Graham asks in “Atlantic Pacific.” This collection of poems answers that question.

In this excerpt, I don’t know if she is referring to the black dog of depression, but that’s how it resonates with me:

I dare the black dog

to rise out of my bones, out of the shadows
to flicker fey at the edge of my vision.

Offer a vision. Mine/yours/another’s.
Driving along the winding coastline,

marking the bends of the sea
as it shapes the land…

The place names create much of the pleasure here: Machrie Moor, Smailholm Tower, Lockerbie, Inchcolm Abbey, Ring of Brodgar, Kilmichael Glassary. And the unapologetic use of Scots, some familiar, some not: kail yard, cruisie, cottar, cairn. But Graham’s own gift for language, for image, for color, makes up the rest. As in this poem:

Kilchurn Castle Picturesque

Rough waters: steel-blue, white-capped
like the clouds above. Low hills raise the sky,
shade up to hunter green, sage green,
then misty mountain blue. A storybook view
across the loch to where Kilchurn nestles at its edge
etched out against the loch like a hill itself.
Closer, and towers define themselves,
windows yaw and gape,
chimneys dagger a path to the sky.

Above the doorway: 1693 and crowns. A shield.
Ropes twined like snakes and Celtic knottery.
We climb and duck. I pose,
surprised in an archway. A fallen turret
the plinth for a statue my now-dead father becomes,
my mother laughing at us, she who now
has forgotten her life. In my camera Kilchurn’s light
sears this instant into history, true beauty:
grey stone and a span of grace.

—Neile Graham

I have a handful of travel poems myself, and have never known how to weave them into the tapestry of a book. Neile Graham has the answer—stay longer, write more. “When a mile-long walk can take you 5000 years” (“Westness Walk: Rousay”), then why not?

Graham is Canadian-born but a long resident of Seattle. I am claiming her as a kindred spirit. Learn more at MoonPath Press or at her website (lots of links to more poetry): https://neilegraham.com.

Christopher Howell, THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE

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THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE, Christopher Howell, Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press, 2019.

On the back cover, Kathy Fagan writes: “Howell has been for many years my go-to poet of choice when I need to be reminded of what a poem can do, what a poetry collection can do…”

I can say the same. Howell asks, in “The Giant Causes the Apocalypse,” “[W]hat will comfort us / as we hear our singing stop?” This sometimes strange, sometimes disconcerting collection of poems is an exploration of that question.

The grief in the title permeates the book, without weighing it down, like these lines from “Turnpike and Flow”:

We say it is a long road
but it is only
a life
slipping past, dark and bright, abandoning
a few broken tools and shoes, once
in a while something beautiful but too big
to carry.

Howell is truly a gem in the Washington State poetry world. He has 20 books. He teaches in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University, and is an editor/director for both Lynx House Press and Willow Spring Books. Let us say he has a large and interested following. So it’s odd to find, bracketed in the middle of a long poem, these words: “[Sometimes I want you to stop / reading so I can / go on alone into the dark sublingual light…” (“Cloud of Unknowing”). I love the juxtaposition of dark with light. It’s a sentence (it’s a whole book) that takes chances.

Maybe Howell isn’t so much exploring the big questions, as urging his readers to explore them.

Here’s the final poem, which first appeared in Poetry International: 

Homecoming

I put on my good black shoes, my shirt
of grey softness that reminds me of luck,

and the blue hat given me
by a child who left

this earth that even her shadow
made so beautiful.

And then, well, I set out
down the clamor of roads

and, almost by accident, onto paths
through dense apothecaries of evergreen and fern

and finally to meadow and orchard
risen from the dead into a contentment

that did not know me
and wouldn’t take my money or my name.

Did I not see I was the same no one
who had lived there always

and could never return?
Did I not perceive the multitudes

waving their arms like wind to be known again
and gathered like pieces of a god?

How many many years, how much spent blood,
to unpilgrim ourselves, to stand before an empty house

glistening with the grief of a happy life.

—Christopher Howell

“…and after that there must be the dancing” he writes in “Surveillance.” Or, “the dancing / and the weeping / and the feast.”

You can learn more about Christopher Howell at https://www.eou.edu/mfa/faculty/christopher-howell-poetry/, or on Wikipedia and Artist Trust. I found “A Conversation with Christopher Howell” about this particular book at https://truemag.org/2018/11/08/a-conversation-with-christopher-howell/.

 

 

A few offerings to lift your thoughts

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This morning I cracked open another poetry book that proves resistant to being read quickly. But I also found a new post from blogger Deborah Brasket, waiting patiently for me in my voluminous gmail.

Brasket turns to the poetry of Czeslaw Milocz to find direction and comfort in our difficult times.

Days After the World Was Supposed to End

Two other bloggers, or, I guess, sub-stackers, that I read regularly are Richard Rohr (you can find his daily meditations here: https://cac.org/tag/richard-rohr/ ) and Parker J. Palmer, whose Living the Questions always encourages me (find him here: https://parkerjpalmer.substack.com/.

Completely by accident — I was searching for the source of a quote from Lorene Niedecker — I came across this:

Uncaging the Bird in the Mind: William Henry Hudson and the Gift of the Ruin of Your Best Laid Plans

Leah Naomi Green, THE MORE EXTRAVAGANT FEAST

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THE MORE EXTRAVAGANT FEAST, Leah Naomi Green, Graywolf Press, 2020. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award, 2019, selected by Li-Young Lee.

Because I have skipped a couple Aprils of my poetry-book-a-day in celebration of National Poetry Month, there’s a huge stack of poetry books waiting for my close attention. Where do all these books come from? People send me books; I exchange books with poets at readings; I pick up books in my local bookstore and can’t bring myself to put them down again; on occasion, I deliberately choose a book by a poet I don’t know—curious about the poet, or about the press.

I see each book as a sort of debt incurred, and this month is an opportunity to pay back the poetry community for supporting me.

So, where or when did I pick up this book? I don’t remember! That it was selected by Li-Young Lee (a favorite poet of mine) for this prestigious award no doubt has much to do with my having it.

Waking Up the Bell

The poem is the slag heap,
and what I keep I keep.

The axe I did not make, the trees
do what I can’t: converting light

for when it’s gone. The fire
and the forges

call the metals back
like meteorites from orbit.

The ore is that which changes me,
extracts me from myself.

The iron tonsil of the bell
I neither wrought nor swung

cleaves hours into halves,
muscles to my bone.

It scores my weeks,
spills them

one at a time
in the lap of the ferrous valley.

We’ll break them open this way,
melt them back to days.

—Leah Naomi Green

Although the poems are not what I would call Whitmanesque, each section has an epigraph from Whitman, and, like Walt Whitman’s poems, these poems celebrate and sing the body. Stiff hip, whorl of an ear, “fingers and formed lung.” Some of my favorite poems in this collection are about pregnancy and childbirth. Other poems are about introducing a child to the world, about the death of grandparents, about eating and other kinds of caring that go into sustaining our bodies.

The tenderness and simplicity of these lines in “Week Twenty: Indulgences” threw me back to my own daughters’ early childhood:

Last night
her small clothes
hung on the line waiting,
and I loved them there
all night,
their drying
in the quiet.

High praise from the back cover:

“Time doesn’t move, we move,” says Tolstoy. And so we travel—inside our bodies, inside our days, our families. Leah Naomi Green’s calm, clear eye documents the essential, elemental music of this journey. —Ilya Kaminsky

The darkness and suffering of living on earth are assumed in this work, woven throughout the fabric of its lineated perceptions and insights, and yet, it is ultimately informed by the deep logic of compassion (is there a deeper human logic?) and enacts the wisdom of desire and fecundity reconciled with knowledge of death and boundedness. —Li-Young Lee

To write poems “informed by the deep logic of compassion” is a great goal.

You can learn more about Leah Naomi Green at her website, including how to purchase her book.