ONLY THE ONE SKY

When I received and read a copy of Pinyon Publishing’s recent release of a volume of poetry, Only The One Sky by Dabney Stuart, I kept thinking about another book of poems entitled Call and Response, an exchange in poetic form written by Louisiana poets Darrell Bourque and Jack Bedell. Both books represent a kind of counterpoint and harmony that flows between two poets to create a spiritual synthesis, embracing past and present in a medley of poems. In the case of Only the One Sky, Stuart has a conversation that focuses on joy and loss with an ancient poet from the Tang Dynasty of eighth century China.

Stuart names his connection “the old poet,” and transcends the boundaries of time, reaching back to antiquity for his subject, Wang Wei, who once wrote to his friend P’ei Ti about walking “hand in hand, composing poems as we went…down twisting paths to the banks of clear streams.” Although the poets have diverging personalities and sensibilities, they share communications that complement each other and in their listening and speaking, the reader is treated to meditations on nature, breath, family, Stuart’s musings about “the filtering years, ineffable ways/that have gentled us to this life: magic,/ grief and error, the lifting of veils./ Gratitude. Elation./ A butterfly, an unfolding shadow.”

In the old poet’s poem “Something Like That,” Stuart likens his feelings about longing to a passage from a Conrad novel, lamenting “I have no idea what I long for. /The old poet shifted on his dinghy seat./Only that I long for it./I don’t long for it because it’s impossible/ to attain, but because it’s impossible/for me not to long for it, whatever it is…”  I was reminded of the Sehnsucht of Simone Weil’s passage in Waiting for God: “When we possess a beautiful thing, we still desire something. We do not in the least know what it is. We want to get behind the beauty, but it…like a mirror sends back our own desire for goodness. It is a…mystery that is painfully tantalizing.” In Stuart’s passage there is a sense of the poet remembering fleeting joys, yet he is aware that we seem to be separated from that which is desired, as Corbin Carnell points out in Bright Shadow of Reality, “a ceaseless longing which always points beyond…” Stuart masterfully uses the “old poet” to personify this quest for the secret that remains hidden to us.

Stuart captures the images of wandering and nature in an exquisite poem, “Not the Same,” as the old poet ruminates about his life by the river. “It is always, the same and not the same./The cluster of willows at the near bend/turns yellow in autumn. Its bare branches/flow in the small breezes. He dreams of them./ Sometimes he wakes, uncertain in the darkness,/lies quietly on his cot, listening/for the silence to break, an owl leaving,/the river bearing itself, the willows shushing.”

Using a more contemporary voice, Stuart roots us in his home place with “Porch Screen,” providing the reader and his old poet friend a glimpse of domesticity: “Once your hair fell across your face, tilted aside./My finger to your chin, a brushing kiss…/Someone to talk with, to share the rabbit stew,/the porch screen flaring with late afternoon sun.” The poet crosses the divide in time between the old poet and the younger one with dialogue featuring affection that connects both poets in the shared blessing of an evening meal.

In Only The One Sky Stuart speaks to poets, living and dead, who have transported readers into a spiritual dimension, creating his own inscriptions about a journey filled with the sight of  radiance everywhere, the sacrament of poets’ connections, and the “atmosphere of infinite suggestion.”* 

Dabney Stuart has been a resident at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, has held a Virginia Artists Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006 he won the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize. His work is in the audio and video archives at the Library of Congress.

Only The One Sky is available from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403 and from amazon.com.

*A.C. Bradley. Oxford Lectures on Poetry.

TIME'S BODY

I was first introduced to Dabney Stuart's work through Gary Entsminger, publisher of Pinyon Publishing, an independent press in Montrose, Colorado, and was impressed by Stuart's metaphysical musings in Greenbrier Forest, which I reviewed in 2012. His new book, Time's Body, a collection of new and selected poems, 1994-2014, is the work of a mature voice, resonating with both eloquence and humor. It is a voice filled with formal seriousness and unhurried playfulness, not wholly committed to the canons of intellectualism or confessionalism—the voice of an aging troubadour who quotes Andre' Viette in the preliminary pages of the book: "Nothing's going to grow if it's not there."

Everything is here in this multi-layered collection—from spare poems in the Chinese tradition to longer ruminations about characters like William Shakespeare and about controvertible black holes in the universe. The book's stark cover, a photograph of an annular solar eclipse by Stan Honda, could imply a certain darkness within the pages, but contrarily, Time's Body is dazzling with sensual dramas, encounters with the natural world, and lyrics about lightness and energy.

As a former clarinetist, I'm partial to woodwinds, and the poem that exemplified that sense of control needed to play music or write enduring poetry is that of "Solo," one of Stuart's newer poems. The description of an oboe player's effect on the listener is masterful, a beautiful solo in itself...

"Her music, /sinuous as swallow flight, /emptied the mind, too. /Nothing became/the way it floated, its local air, swallowed by nothing./She followed a trail of notes,/but her listeners/went off into myriad lost/meanders, keeping/almost no time. They knew/nothing, did not think/about form and void, /or anything/on the face of the earth/or moving upon its waters. /Instead they took heart/from this wind blowing them away." 

You can almost see the black notes rising in this acknowledgement of the musician playing a wind instrument and giving lift to the listener. 

In "Yucca Mountain," readers hear the echoes of a metaphysician as Stuart describes the mountain over Ghost Dance Fault and the ghosts that haunt the fault, "vibrations... crazing the music to which their bodies ribboned." Unfettered by sentimentalism, Stuart speaks of giving his father away to open mesas and leaving echoes behind, assuring the reader that 

"...if you go there/you can breathe them. Our heels click a joy/together. Our motions give a pattern/to their air anyone can join, /invisible leaves from a notebook flying, /ghosting our dance, feathering its voices."

This is a buoyant aria linking myth and the poet's memory in a spiritual refrain.

Stuart contributes a bit of sensual whimsicality in "Staying in Touch," a poem about falling in love with the same woman living "in the blind/hole at the center/of my left eye," who gives him the "big ecstasy" of lovemaking. It is told with the wryness of a poet who recognizes the body's limitations and describes the aftermath of coming together as "...beached walruses /drifting..."  

Time's Body is a collection of poems that helps readers accept the temporal state of the human condition, to see both the here and now while probing the light beyond. It is somber, meditative, and forthright about the terrors and the consolations of life in "time's body."

Dabney Stuart has published eighteen previous volumes of poetry, is a former resident at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, has held a Virginia Artists Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006, he was awarded the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize. His work is housed in the audio and video archives at the Library of Congress. He lives with wife Sandra in Lexington, Virginia.

Time's Body is available from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403.  

PINYON REVIEW #3

Literary journals have been around for a long time; the oldest being the North American Review, and the oldest continuous one being the Yale Review.  Here at Sewanee, literati take pride in the Sewanee Review which was established in 1892.  Today there are the “ezines,” or online journals, which include prestigious publications like Evergreen Review, Story South, Unlikely Stories, and numerous other journals online that are eyed askance by the print publications but which contain arresting stories, poems, and articles.

A newcomer on the literary journal scene is one that I’ve mentioned in previous blogs – the Pinyon Review, a journal published in Montrose, Colorado by Editor Gary Lee Entsminger and Managing Editor, Susan Elliott.  The May issue of this journal just arrived in my post office box yesterday, and like any poet hungry for publication, I searched for my poem “In Memory of Mint,” which is included in the journal.

As I’m a Louisiana native and also live in what I call "misty, moisty Sewanee" part of the year, my eyes were drawn to the cover photograph of a spring blizzard by Rob Walton that was more reminiscent of foggy mornings in both locales and of the 19^th century Louisiana artist, Drysdale, and his famous misty landscapes.

Poetry comprises a large part of the Pinyon Review, and among the well-known poets featured is Dabney Stuart, whom Gary describes as a “master of the English language and highly acclaimed poet,” the author of 17 volumes of poetry, most recently Pinyon Publishing’s Greenbrier Forest.  Three of Stuart’s poems are included, but the minimalist poem, “Times’s Body” particularly resonated with me:

The skybell

with neither clapper nor dome

rings.

Air draws

words into its passing,

nothing in some other

guise, time’s

body

Snow fills the bell,

gathers into its tolling,

falls.

Stuart’s collection of poems for young readers that inspire wonder about the animal world was published by Pinyon in 2010 in a volume entitled Open the Gates and included enchanting paintings of porpoises, lemurs, doves, water buffalos, and other animals rendered by Susan Elliott.

Gary and Susan treat us to the first chapter of the Fall of ’33, “Turtle,” in this issue of the journal, alluding to “something happened that changed everything,” a chapter which should titillate readers to order the book and discover the happening that changed everything in a family in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains during a train ride west – a story that includes Indian and mystical ancestry in Virginia, dating back to Shakespeare’s time and even earlier.

Julia K. Walton, a newcomer to the journal, wows readers with her textile artwork, incorporating repurposed fabrics.  Walton creates patchwork, appliqués, collages, rag rugs, and acrylic paintings, drawing her ideas from nature and colors natural to the environment.  Her set of Nine Green Britain and 1 Austerity Britain of flags comprising patchwork quilts with cotton and cotton mix textiles is an arresting picture among three “Fire Horse Textiles” photographs in Pinyon Review #3.

Another art chapter entitled “Watercolor Baskets” by Mary Moran Miller presents interesting colors and forms in baskets made of heavy watercolor paper.  The paper is painted, cut into strips for weaving, and made into baskets.  I was attracted to “Harlo, 2011,” a basket 18”x4”x2” in different shades of blue and formed in a conical shape, an interesting vessel that Miller describes as “holding my ideas.” 

A friend and academician laughed aloud when she read Richard Cecil’s poem entitled “Faculty Annual Report”:

Honors: None Grants and Awards: Zero.

Course Development: Taught the same way

as always for exactly the same pay.

Conferences—attended/session leader: No.

Professional Activities.  Trudged through snow

to school in January, through rain in May.

Publications (novels, stories, essays):

Poems in small journals (see below).

Volunteer Activities: None.

When I did work, I didn’t work for free;

in unpaid time, I loafed or else had fun.

Service in the University:

Attended pointless meetings of committees.

Attended pointless meetings of committees.

These are just a few of the contributions in the third issue of Pinyon Review, another significant collection of literature and artwork published in a small cabin in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado -- a journal of “diverse styles and techniques,” as publisher Gary Entsminger describes the latest edition of his literary publication that celebrates the arts and sciences.

WINTER PURSUITS

It’s 70 degrees this afternoon in south Louisiana, and I just shed a leather jacket that I had been prompted to wear because the early morning temps were in the 50’s. What a wimp some of my friends in the mountains think I am! As I write this, winter storms are brewing in the West and Midwest, and this morning’s email from Gary Entsminger, publisher of Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado, carried a wintry message. “At last,” Gary writes, “we awoke to a winter storm. Five inches of snow have fallen so far, and it is snowing steadily. The atmosphere is calm…nice. Susan (Susan Elliott, Gary’s partner and artist at Pinyon) and Garcia (a beautiful black Lab) shoveled our first paths and stocked the feeders, so we have about 100 little birds dancing and pecking in the snow and on the pinyon branches. The mountains have been getting good snow for a few days, but our storms had been just dusting until this morning. Hooray! It’s a classic winter wonderland outside…”

Gary and Susan have many indoor pursuits that keep them busy while the snow falls and have been working steadily on publishing books, selling second-hand editions, practicing guitar mandolin, and piano music, singing and dancing, cooking and canning. Their latest indoor pursuit is a beautiful project that they finished just in time for Christmas. Susan created Art Cards from two of Pinyon’s book publication list, Open the Gates: Poems for Young Readers by Dabney Stuart, which contains 43 illustrations drawn and painted by Susan; and Why Water Plants Don’t Drown: Survival Strategies of Aquatic and Wetland Plants by Victoria Sullivan, which contains 62 illustrations rendered by Susan.

Almost all of the artwork in Open the Gates is of animals because the creatures are what the poems are about. Susan chose eight animals that displayed the different vibrant watercolor styles she used in the book: bat, rhino, fiddler crab, newt, bumble bee (one of her favorites because it’s a Bombus appositus bumble bee on a Delphinium barbeyi larkspur, subjects in Susan’s dissertation study – she has a Ph.D. in Botany), impala, water ouzel, and wolf.

We ordered several of the packets of the Art Cards featuring Susan’s illustrations in Why Water Plants Don’t Drown and plan to order more. Although Why Water Plants Don’t Drown includes technical illustrations to accompany the section in which Vickie describes the primary needs of plants: light, gases, structural support, and reproduction, no Art Cards were created from this section. Other sections include aquatic plants (sub-categories of Divers, Floaters, and Floating-Leaf Plants in Why Water Plants Don’t Drown) and wetland plants (sub-category “Waders”). For the Water Plants cards, Susan chose four aquatic examples (lotus, sea grasses, spatterdock, and water hyacinth) and four Wetland examples (water tupelo, cranberry, venus fly trap and swamp milkweed).

We’ve given several packets of the Art Cards as Christmas gifts that our friends opened immediately, and the response to Susan’s artwork has been tremendous. For those readers who haven’t purchased either of these books, you’re in for a treat. Susan says she chose images that were striking and elegant on their own (without accompanying text or poems), and the images bear out her descriptions of both animals and plants.

Use the Art Cards link to contact the publisher online or at mailing address: Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

GREENBRIER FOREST

During the 90’s, when I visited my godfather Markham Peacock in Blacksburg, Virginia, he and his friend, Preston Fraser, took us on Sunday jaunts to lunch at the Greenbrier Hotel near the town of White Sulphur Springs in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. This magnificent five-star hotel is located in a valley of the Allegheny Mountains close to the Greenbrier State Forest, an area with rocky ridges and streams, forested with many pines and hemlocks and bisected by Kate Mountain. We did not visit the State Forest of over 5,100 acres, but passed through some of the most beautiful areas in West Virginia, stopping along the way so that Markham and Preston could watch trains cross a trestle nearby. Both men were in their eighties, but watched and listened to the trains with small-boy fascination. When I saw the title, Greenbrier Forest by Dabney Stuart on Pinyon Publishing’s list of recent poetry publications, I was overcome with nostalgia as Markham Peacock was a tall figure in my life, and he loved to make that Sunday drive to Greenbrier County for many years, always scheduling the White Sulphur Springs trip when I went up from Louisiana to Virginia for my annual visit.

I ordered Greenbrier Forest, asking that it be sent by overnight mail, and it arrived yesterday. It’s a lovely book with an attractive green-hued cover displaying Dabney Stuart’s photograph of “Hart’s Run” within the Greenbrier State Forest and complemented by a back cover design of tree leaves scattering in the wind, executed by Susan Elliott who designs all of Pinyon Publishing’s arresting covers.

Dabney Stuart and his wife spend a week in the Greenbrier State Park twice a year, and Dabney has been writing and revising the poems for Greenbrier Forest in that peaceful environment for fifteen years. The poems are untitled and uncategorized “contemplations” that immediately struck me with their similarity to Oriental poetry. I thought about the work of the great Sufi poet, Rumi, whose creativity came from a “mind within a mind,” the inner vision of the world revealing itself to a sharp intellectual perception. An example of that similarity between Dabney and Rumi is a poem on p.7 of Greenbrier Forest: “Fog pockets in the hemlocks./To absorb well what you are/in the midst of leaving,/precious for not being desired./They dry, lift./The needles sharpen.”

I have a very old hemlock in my front yard here at Sewanee, Tennessee, and as I read the poem, I could see the aged tree topped by fog, its needles drying and sharpening as the fog lifted and passed on — and, at a deeper mystical level, I envisioned an aging person accepting who he is in the world without desiring to stay in the place he presently occupies.

Oriental poets claim that poetry is the fruit of spiritual vision, and this is a meet description of the poetry in Dabney’s book – it moves like a transformation of the soul, as Dabney notes, “Words are the spirit’s rove and nestle,/its till. Waking into them roils and tosses,/the solace of rift and abrasion, spark,/our letting go./Into. Through. Little cheers/the spirit leases as it moves,/no matter where.”

Dabney skillfully conveys his response to the forest without detailed, concrete descriptions of trees, birds, streams — writing that “as the morning gathers/names fade toward their sources,/fluent eventual, birds/becoming the sky they filter through,/the soft beat of wings left on the air/a web, a voice.”

I was particularly drawn to the succinct ending of a poem that resonates with a tongue-in-cheek, philosophical metaphor: “Dismay, the little chisel,/and its small-minded acolyte,/bewilderment, chipping,/chipping. A beat/ to tune by, an inclination.”

Coleman Barks has said of Rumi’s poems, “they are not so much about anything as spoken from within something. Call it enlightenment, ecstatic love, spirit, soul, truth, the ocean of ilm (divine luminous wisdom)…names do not matter…” I pondered those words as I read Dabney’s poetry — poems in which the inner eye becomes the tool of perception, as he pays homage to the Spirit with language from the place of “speaking within something.”

Greenbrier Forest can be ordered at www.pinyon-publishing.com/books.html and by mail at Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.