ABOUT "LITTLE ESSAYS"

 

Fourteen years ago, I began writing blogs, or as two of my friends called this medium, "writing essays." When I think back to the inception of "A Word's Worth," I hear those two voices urging me to record short pieces about people and events, "exploring the fullness of life," as Rebecca Dale said of E. B. White's essays in The New Yorker. Some weeks I hear the "thud of ideas" White described as the action of his Muse. On other days, I hear the roll of thunder without the lightning of ideas.

Today is noisy enough with occasional thunder rolls, but the lightning flashes are confined to memories. And that's OK because most subject matter in my on-the-cusp-of 86 years old mind lies in the depository of memories. This rainy day I probe the memory of my decision to become a poet.

I was in the sixth grade and had returned to civilization after my father's great folly about the family becoming gypsies via tent camping, sleeping on roadside park tables, bathing in rivers en route to California in 1946. I was eleven years old and sighed in relief when we returned to the small southern town of Franklinton, Louisiana. There, I decided to become a poet in my sixth-grade classroom filled with what I called "country people" (offspring of farming parents). I'd been reading in a sixth-grade reader and delighted in a section on poetry. "I can do that," I thought, and promptly wrote a few lines about my new home: "away from the town's noisy din/from the roar of the cotton gin…" I wrote this following the example of my mother's hero, Robert Louis Stevenson. It's one of the very few rhyming verses I've left to posterity. Well, it does sound a bit better than "A birdie with a yellow bill/hopped upon my window sill…."

For approximately thirty years, I thought about becoming a poet, read a lot of poetry, and finally submitted a poem to The American Weave (now defunct) magazine, which published "My Father's Hands." The American Weave was a literary journal that paid me $18 from the Hart Crane Memorial Fund. Did I become a poet? No, this publishing event occurred in 1967, and I spent twenty more years reading and studying poetry and writing poems "underground." I did not return to thoughts about publishing poetry until 2008, when I moved to Sewanee, Tennessee. It is here that the biggest lightning strike in my life occurred, the flash in 2020 when I wrote Ridges, now on sale*. It's a book featuring my poems that accompany Don Thornton's wonderful paintings of Louisiana chenieres.

And so much for rain-inspired blogs and "come lately" poetry books. Tomorrow the weather may be sunny.

My latest book of poetry, Ridges, is available from me at P. O. Box 3124, Sewanee, Tennessee 37375 and from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403. 

 

 

RIDGES

 

Cover of Ridges

On our arrival in Sewanee, TN, we found three boxes of Ridges, a volume of my poetry and Don Thornton’s paintings produced by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. Fortunately, Sister Madeleine Mary, CSM of the Sisters of St. Mary here in Sewanee, TN, had rescued and taken our books into our home on Fairbanks Circle during heavy rain, and all was saved. Since then, I’ve been sending out copies to a few regular readers that I hope will respond to my most-favored book. I sincerely appreciate Dr. Mary Ann Wilson’s salute to the “…blending of natural and human, art and place in a loving tribute to a fellow artist and friend, seeing in those ridges ‘the mudflats of old sufferings…”

The reference is to a volume of poetry and paintings designed by Susan Entsminger, publisher and editor of Pinyon Publishing, whose own artistic talent showcases the work of Don Thornton’s paintings and that which I consider my ultimate book of poetry. I had transported Don’s paintings from New Iberia, Louisiana to Sewanee a year ago where they sat in a box for months until I was able to overcome ennui caused by the threat of Covid disease hovering around everyone in the world. Perhaps the disease itself made me wonder if I’d ever feel like writing again. Only Don’s beautiful paintings could have challenged me to bring his art into book form. And after I sat with his work daily for several months, the Chenier Plain became my place of inspiration.

 

As botanist Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan explained in Ridges, the term chenier (or cheniere) derives from the Cajun word chene for oak. The Mississippi Chenier Plain is an ecological feature composed of coastal ridges 12-18 miles wide and 6-20 feet in elevation. The oak ridges stretch 124 miles from Sabine Pass, Texas, to Southwest Point, Louisiana. This plain is a rich mixture of wetlands, uplands, and open water that developed 7000 to 3000 years BP when water levels stood 16-20 feet lower than at present. Sea level rise between 3000 and 2500 BP submerged the cheniers to the extent we see them today.

The special foreword by Darrell Bourque, Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2007-2011, explains that in Ridges, “each poem takes an artist-poet-teacher to the crossroads of being, that sacred ridged place where Thornton lived most profoundly, most honestly, most deeply…” This morning I rejoice as I re-read Bourque’s foreword and take another long look at the “blue, blue skies, the rosy sand in the mud flats, the yellow he assigned to love, the brooding skies too, the impending storms, the golden, fuchsia, lavender and purple sunsets, each detail springboard for Moore to attach to a life, a marriage, a vocation, the sacred, the obstinate, the tortured, the mendicant, the explorer…”

I am proud of this book, of Don, of Suzi, his wife; of Vickie, who photographed the paintings, of Darrell and his grace-filled poetic introduction to the book; and of Susan, who realized the importance of making Ridges available to poets, biographers, and nature lovers. I hope that Ridges finds a prominent place in Louisiana history and culture as it found its precious place in my love of the Louisiana landscape through the eyes of master artist Don Thornton.

Here is “Blue Skies,” a poem and accompanying painting from Ridges:

 

 Blue Skies

That blue sky so close to the water,

a mirage of ridges behind,

was clear enough to banish bad spirits;

he could hear Ella Fitzgerald …

no, it was Willie Nelson …

singing “Blue Skies” that day.


The scattered frequency

moved his eyes into calmer light,

thoughts cleared of apparitions,

the mud flats of old sufferings,

and the wind, a mouth for Spirit,

created verse void of form within.

 

Oaks on the ridge swayed

while he drifted in the boat,

soon fell asleep

in the color of blue,

awakened to music dissolving,

      his soul spinning on a tuning fork.

Order books by emailing me at deaconwriter@gmail.com or snail mailing at PO Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375. 

A SALUTE TO STUART FRIEBERT AND LISTENING ALL NIGHT TO THE RAIN

Although my blogging has suffered a gradual demise, when notable books and events cause a stir in this isolated household, I feel an old impulse to write a few lines as I am doing this morning after receiving Pinyon Publishing’s latest book of poetry, Listening All Night to the Rain by Su Dongpo (Su Shi) and translated by Jiann I. Li and David Young.  This collection of poems arrived the same day as I received notice that a friend and “comrade in words” (as Stuart Friebert inscribed one of his books to me) had died. The Pinyon publication, Listening All Night to the Rain is a translated book of poetry from one of Friebert’s colleagues at Oberlin College where Friebert formed the Oberlin Creative Writing program and co-founded Oberlin College Press.

Friebert was a poetry pen pal of mine who endorsed several of my books and who was a master of poetic translations. He not only inspired poets and translators, he wrote precise and extraordinary poetry and prose and received The Ohioana Book Award for his book of poetry, Floating Heart published by Pinyon in 2014. In that collection of poems, he wrote about his own “Eve of the End:” “No one told us anything about/ this before we started out. When we’re out/of sight, you may go back to your reading,/but expect a bright light,/your eyes to blink.” I think he wrote his own wry epitaph. A man who loved word play, Friebert often sent e-mails to me that showed his playful and endearing personality. I valued his insights about writing poetry (“learn to be lightning”) and his willingness to be audacious about whatever vocation a person pursues in life. 

Jiann I. Lin and David Young, who translated Listening All Night to the Rain, must have pleased Friebert with their choice of poems from Su Dongpo that “combine simplicity with universality” David Young writes in the Introduction to this volume. According to Young, Taoism and Zen Buddhism helped show the 11th-century poet Su Dongpo the way to wonder and delight and reinforced his poetic sensibilities. Readers can visualize him wandering through remote Chinese provinces, living through exiles because of his political affiliations and writing quatrains about his excursions, sometimes involving heavy drinking during his explorations.

Su Dongpo’s brother, Su Zhe, was also a poet, and Su Dongpo exchanged poems, as well as gossip, with him in deeply emotional poems using brief and beautiful imagery that characterizes Chinese poetry: “The lamp drops cinders/the darkening candle wick/hangs down/I poke the ashes in the stove/over and over/sniffing the last fragrance…across the sea between us/the moon shies clear as crystal/I share it with him now.”

I enjoyed many of the temple poems; e.g., “At a temple, asked to help name a pavilion:” “Glory will flourish and decay/as transitory/as any wind or thunder./What lasts can be/as simple as/red blooming flowers./The master priest sits quietly/watching an empty shelf/thinking about a name,/observing the concept of ‘real’/and also the concept of ‘nothingness’/because they’re both the same.” Like most of the lyrics in this collection, this collection reflects the economy of Oriental poetry; but the compression still conveys time and place without exaggerated documentation.

The wandering and exposure to rain, snow, and seasonal changes sometimes troubles this vagabond poet, and he often expresses a weariness with which aging readers can identify: From “A Weary night”: “In this lonely village/one dog barks all night/the moon wanes/few people on the road/my thinning hair /has turned bright white/my years of travel have taught me/how to be homesick/out in the empty fields/spinster cicadas are buzzing/nothing to show for their labor/nothing accomplished.” 

For readers who’re drawn to Oriental poetry, Su Dongpo offers eloquent and peaceful reading during this time of stress and isolation due to disease and political upheaval in our country. The book is one that expresses the poet’s enduring spirit through adversities where he endures punishments for his political associations. In “At Spirit Mountain, touring with friends in rain,” he thumbs his nose at bureaucrats “off duty,” “…I’ve spent the day/ strolling around/with my two friends/here in the rain and mist/big magpies soar/rising up and diving down/while travelers cross/appearing and disappearing/among the groves of trees.”

Listening All Night to the Rain contains the Chinese version of all poems on opposite pages from the English version pages, and a look at the enchanting symbols made me wish that I’d learned another language to translate as Stuart Friebert once urged me to do.

The book could be viewed as another tribute to the master translator, Friebert. It’s a wonderful collection by Jiann I. Lin and David Young and emerges as another of Pinyon Publishing’s remarkable publications. Kudos to Susan Entsminger, who continues to carry the tradition of excellent literature established by her and her deceased husband, Gary Entsminger.

Copies available at Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403

ENTERING THE DAY: POEMS BY MICHAEL MILLER. (Pinyon Publishing).

BACK TO BLOGGING BOOK REVIEWS…

Wars leave scars in the minds of those who serve in any military conflict, and survivors often share their experiences through journaling, drawing, writing poetry, and novels. In Michael Miller’s case, he records glimpses of several wars through his own experience and the engagements of his relatives in military conflict. Although he reflects on other experiences “entering the day,” his accounts of servicemen during several wars are the most arresting poems in this volume. 

In “A Different Time,” Miller reflects on the experience of  a Marine who landed on Okinawa during World War II during his walk across a meadow in Massachusetts, “far from the black sand of that island/Where he left his blood;/His Purple Heart remain[ing] in/the glove compartment of His Buick beside his pistol,…” this poem followed by  “Tide of Blood,” a powerful salute to those whose “lives deprived /Of their future, the letters/He was asked to mail, ‘In case,’/And with each whiskey and cigarette/Another comrade appears, his face/Still innocent across the table.” Although Miller, of course, did not serve in this conflict, he recounts the experience as if he had served alongside the narrator in a convincing unsentimental portrait of a WWII survivor.

Miller’s own experiences in war are encapsulated in Section V, Verse VII, a powerful retrospective poem familiar to many veterans of the Vietnam conflict: “Only once did we visit/The wall, move our fingers/Over the chiseled names,/The Marines we knew./Flowers, photographs,/Letters and crayon drawings/Rested before the wall./No one walked away with/Their head held high.” This poem invoked a poignant memory of an encounter with a Vietnam veteran when I attended The Sixth Day course in upper state New York. A survivor of the Vietnam War stood up among 300 participants at this event where we had been “processing” experiences all night, and as the sun came up, he confessed that he was deeply hurt because he had been maligned as a veteran of that conflict and never properly thanked for his service. The moderator told him to stand up and declared, “In the name of the president of the United States and all U.S. citizens, we thank you for your service and remember all who served in this conflict.” Two weeks later, after we had returned home, we read about the wall going up, and I’ve always believed we had something to do with this commemoration.

Miller does not leave readers suspended with dark reflections and redeems his experiences with a more hopeful poem entitled “On Nauset Beach,” where “beyond [his] limitations of old age…” “he strides through the surprise/Of an unswept morning/On a shoulder of Nauset Beach/Singing to the Atlantic,/The thrashing incoming tide,/the waves breaking onto the shore/Like sleeves of ruffled lace,/The gannets swooping/With black-tipped wings/Beating a welcome…” Here is Miller at his lyrical best, counteracting the darkness of war and old age with his insightful voice and an undaunted heart.

This poet is not without humor and is capable of a comfortable irony in “Morning Song in Amherst” (his home) where Miller encounters a street person, “In July, her hair a tangled nest/No bird would return to/Beside the Dickinson home/A cigarette between/Her dirty fingers…” He suggests that Emily Dickinson would have invited the woman into her home for “a bath and breakfast” and when the woman volunteers that she slept on a bench beside the home all night and no one bothered her, Miller writes that he offered her bath and breakfast, “almost hearing Emily say, ‘Yes, oh yes!’”

In Section IV of Entering the Day, Miller’s poem about Virginia Wolfe entitled “Virginia,” shows that he can achieve that which he believes Virginia was capable of: “…her words/Were meant to be elsewhere,/In perfect sentences she could control.” That capability is shown throughout this volume, Miller’s meditations emerging with crafted control over his phrasing. Here is a true voice devoid of mawkishness in the delivery of difficult experiences — poems without cloying lamentations about the ravages of war and an uncertain future —conditions with which we are confronted in the wake of  Coronavirus, “a language wait[ing] to be heard” that Miller seems to be game for, despite…

Michael Miller has published nine poetry collections, and his first book The Joyful Dark was the Editor’s Choice winner of the McGovern Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, The New Republic, The American Scholar, The Southern Review, and many other literary journals. In 2014 he became the First Prize Winner of the W. B. Yeats Society Poetry Award and was anthologized in Yeats 150 (Lilliput Press, Dublin).

I am proud to add that Michael Miller is a good friend and supporter of my work. Salut, Michael! We eagerly look for more. And kudos to Susan Entsminger for the lovely artwork on the cover of Entering the Day: “Protea from the Upcountry Farmer’s Market, Maui.”

Order online or from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose CO 81403

A DOUBLE LIFE

A Double Life: In Poetry and Translation by Stuart Friebert, one of the last books Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing, worked on before he died last month, appeared on Pinyon’s publishing list this past week. Susan Entsminger, co-editor and publisher of Pinyon, never missed a beat as she carried on the press’s work, executing Gary’s wish to publish the work of distinguished Stuart Friebert, a poet translator and co-founder of the Field Translation Series, Oberlin College Press, and Field Magazine. Friebert’s credentials are formidable, and this collection of memoirs and “late poetry” give the reader double magic in Friebert’s encounters with famous writers; e.g., Gunter Grass, Maya Angelou, Hilde Domin, Michael Mann, and other literary noteworthies. 

A touch of Friebert’s wry sensibilities introduce this volume as he recounts his experiences in an MI (military intelligence unit) in which he is left standing alone when every man receives a sharpshooter medal except him, and a man in another unit shreds the human hand holding a stick at which the sharpshooters fire when it strays above the sight line. Friebert follows this accessible essay with more solemn interviews about his visits to German poets when he receives a grant to publish poets in a textbook containing the poetry of Gunter Grass, Paul Celan, Karl Krolow, Hilde Domin and other authors who he writes were on their way to illustrious careers. The textbook never materialized, but Friebert’s narration of his encounters with these renowned German writers constitute legendary material.

During Friebert’s interview with Hilde Domin, readers share his enjoyment of her pot of tea and ginger cake before hearing her recite her famous “Only A Rose For Support,” which Friebert describes as a poem without metaphor and written in plainspoken diction. The poem begins with the lines: “I make myself a room in the air/among the acrobats and birds/my bed on the trapeze of feelings/like a nest in the wind/on the outermost tip of the branch…” Domin’s poetry reflects an immediacy indicative of several other poets Friebert has translated during his career as a translator: Karl Krolow and the Romanian poet, Marin Sorescu.

Friebert relates that although he and David Young never got around to publishing the aforementioned textbook on which they had based their grant application, “other fruits were harvested”: many translations the Field Translation Series published and the actual stimuli to publish that was engendered through interviews with imminent German poets.

Friebert’s interview with Gunter Grass in Berlin included Grass’s approval of the poems Friebert and Young had chosen to translate, via a donation of cognac and cigars from the interviewers and Grass making sure they understood his poems, “stopping painfully short of suggesting we were dumbing them down,” Friebert relates. Later, in the 90’s, when Friebert revisits Germany to work with Karl Krolow on translations of his poetry, he reads that Grass is having a noon reading in Reichelsheim and attends the event, after which Friebert joins a line of congratulators and is crushed when Grass doesn’t remember him or the cigars and cognac he and Young had provided the writer. Friebert’s wit forms the tone of this essay, as is manifested in many of his narratives.

The above is only a peek into Friebert’s encounters before he concludes with a “how-to-teach” essay on literary translations, followed by a section of Friebert’s late poetry. As I am reading Michael Cunningham’s The Hours alongside A Double Life, I was drawn to the introductory verses of Friebert’s “Cowbelly”: “Look it up: ‘Patches of superfine silt/in the slowest part of rivers.’ Can’t help/thinking Virginia’s last step might have/sunk pleasurably and brought her to/a stop till the stones pressed against/a hip, jolting her on down to the bed./A life spent looking at things less simply/than the rest of us, once tuned up won’t /stop playing…” For me, this is Friebert at his most reflective best, written with his typical spirit of irony.

Friebert creates humorous visual images in “Universal Rights,” relating his discovery of a live mike in a gazebo on the town square where he warbles “The longer you live, the sooner you’ll bloody well die,” an Irish ballad that draws an audience of an albino squirrel, tourists, and a cop who asks ‘Are you all right buddy? Need me to call your wife to pick you up?’” That’s Friebert — lively, outrageously authentic, magical, and engaging.

Readers can double their reading pleasure with this volume that Gary and Susan Entsminger produced — one of Gary’s many legacies, carried on by Susan, where they “glide on thermals /for hours, nary a flap, mated for life.” (from Friebert’s “For Life” at the conclusion of A Double Life.

Order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403. 

THE OLD COASTLINE

Nobel prize winner, Shirin Ebadi of Iran, has said that in order to have understanding of and peace in the world, we must read each other’s literature. I’d add that the emissaries of that mission are translators: think of Coleman Barks translating the Persian poet Mowlavi (Rumi); Jane Kenyon translating the work of the Russian poet, Akhmatova, Stuart Friebert translating the German poet, Karl Krolow…Think also of the independent press, Pinyon Publishing in Colorado, which often publishes international poetry translations, such as its recent release: a volume of selected poetry by M. Vasalis (1909-1998), a Dutch psychiatrist who specialized in treating children and whose work has been translated by Fred Lessing and David Young.

In the introduction to this volume, translators Lessing and Young emphasize that the poet Vasalis had little interest in promoting her work but that her poems “come out of her life, her experience of the natural world, her professional practice, and her family relations, arising from the press of occasion and necessity rather than from an ambition to originality or greatness…” That description alone impressed me because I admire the qualities of humility and modesty that inhere in a writer’s life mission.

Vasalis’s immediacy and simplicity in “Spring,” a poem describing the spring season readers in the northern hemisphere are presently experiencing, resonated with me early in the volume and is perhaps the most whimsical one in The Old Coastline: “The light gusts across the land in spurts,/waking the hard, brief glitter/of the blue, wind-ruffled ditches and canals;/the grass lights up, dims down, goes dark./Two newborn lambs next to a grizzled sheep/stand white, printing youth’s picture against grass./I had forgotten how this was, and that/the spring is not a quiet blossoming,/dreaming softly but a violent growing,/a pure and passionate beginning,/jumping up out of a deep sleep,/and dancing away without a thought.” Although Vasalis has been likened to the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, I hear the voice of Emily Dickinson in this selection the translators included from her first book, Parks and Deserts (1940). 

A reading of selections from her third book, Vistas and Visages, published posthumously in 1954, reveals more serious poetic treatments as Vasalis probes the deeper subjects of suffering and loss arising from Vasalis’s own tragic loss of a child who lived only a year and a half. The imagery in “Star” carries this message of loss in a departure from any formalism and pivots on the figure of her lost child, then concludes in a pastoral scene featuring a cow, a powerful entry into the natural world. “Tonight I saw a star for the first time./He stood alone, he did not quiver./Instantly, he pierced me through./I saw a star, he stood alone, belief/made out of light: so young and from a time/before there was such a thing as grief./The meadows lie unspoken in the light./The cows, so often painted,/restrain, with a young wet eye,/any account of their warm mystery.” That one verse , so much akin to Japanese haiku, underlines the beautiful simplicity of Vasalis’s oeuvre.

In the same volume, Vistas and Visages, Vasalis reveals her love and appreciation of children and her journey as a psychiatrist dealing with youth. “Children Coming Home” evokes strong emotions in those of us who parented young offspring and welcomed them as they returned home from an all-day absence. Her description of them as “big flowers” coming out of the gathering dark, “the chilly evening air/that lightly drapes their cheeks and hair/they are so warm!” is neither Elizabeth Bishop nor Emily Dickinson but simply a mother experiencing intimacy with her young in an intense immediacy. Further, she writes: “Clasped/in the strong clamp of their soft arms/I glimpse the love, shadowless and full./ [not yet exposed to Jungian psychology about shadows that will beset them later] that lives at the bottom of their penetrating eyes,/It is not mixed with pity, which comes later,/and has its reasons — and its boundaries.” It is Vasalis who has the penetrating eyes and appears watchful about the boundaries of innocent children.

In The Old Coastline (2002), readers will enjoy some of Vasalis’s poems about older relationships; i.e., a poignant characterization of her grandmother, a cherished member of the poet’s family constellation in “Old Age”: “Grandmother/snow-white-lace on/her calm sweet, white-satin head/carried when she was in Holland, at home,/the smallest muff in the whole world:/inside a tiny bottle, no bigger/than an ampule./ There was just room/for her hands. Plus one child's hand,/oh, what a delicious nest of fur and/the very softest satin lining/…Her eyes were a constantly changing blue;/you could look into them as long as you liked:/as if you were seeing, through two small openings,/the calm sea on a summer day.” That intimate tribute is both exacting and graceful, two recurring components of the selections chosen by Vasalis’s translators.

Vasalis also gives readers a glimpse of her own ideas about mortality, one with which most of us in our eighties can identify: “I practice like a young bird on the edge/of the nest I must soon forsake/in little faltering flights/and open my beak.”

This translated work by Vasalis is a powerful addition to the canon of international expression and vision.Translator Fred Lessing, a Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist, and retired professor of philosophy, retained his native Dutch language after moving to America at age 12. His fellow translator, David Young, is a poet (Field of Light and Shadow, 2010) an editor of Field magazine, Oberlin College Press, and a translator who enjoys collaborative work with his long-time friend, Fred Lessing.

Thank you Gary and Susan for contributing to the mission of sharing international literature through expert translations! The Old Coastline is another occasion for celebration. 

Order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

WAKING IN THE DARK

Amherst, Massachusetts: inspirational ground for Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Robert Francis, Richard Wilbur and other notable poets…and now the place that has produced a contemporary poet who belongs in that same pantheon of masterful poets: Michael Miller. Miller’s ninth book of poetry, Waking in the Dark, appeared in my mailbox yesterday and is a collection by a poet who faces time and dying with profound wisdom, who is at his best writing intimate revelations about relationships and beautifully cultivated love.

From the opening poem, “Sleeve,” to the concluding “Mortar,” Miller reveals his extraordinary poetic power in a concise style reminiscent of Ted Kooser and Dickinson herself, but his voice is his own, especially when he approaches the threshold of relationships. In the first section of Waking in the Dark, Miller pays homage to his mother, and “Points of Reference” shows an early sensitivity to women: “On Sunday mornings/I climbed into her warm bed,/Not making a sound./Turning away, Mother left me/Her exposed back,/Allowing me to count/The moles I wanted to touch,/this map of beauty/With points of reference/I would seek in each woman/I began to love.” Miller’s tenderness toward women, infused with humor and melancholy, is interwoven throughout Waking in the Dark.

In “Guides,” Miller faces off death using a fox to capture the startling effect of a possible demise, “an hour or ten years/He hopes to be surprised,/Like the red fox appearing/At the fork in the road,/Its left foreleg raised,/A blaze of indecision.” But he continues his life journey as “an old man with no food/Welcoming the sunlight.” 

Miller’s poems about married love carry the mark of maturity, reminding me of the love poems of Pablo Neruda, yet arriving at a point beyond lust: “It was never/The locking of thighs/On that passionate ride/Where we fit perfectly together./It was always about intimacy,/The understanding embrace,/The tenderness coming out/Of the dark that lifted us/With invisible hands.” That verse alone typifies Miller’s mature voice, and further in “Making Love in Pittsburgh:” “…It was the soul longing for /Tenderness as strong as iron, as bridges.”

Among my favorites in this collection is a brief hymn to light: “6:00 A.M.” I know from receiving a few emails from Miller that he gets up early to catch the light that inspires his poetry. He writes: “He raises a slat of the blind,/Peers through the space;/He has always been drawn/To small spaces:/The cracks in the sidewalk/Where the weeds grow./Now he sees a skunk/Crossing the wet grass,/Its stripe a pathway/Of light dividing the dark./Opening the blind/He enters the day—/Treasures are waiting/To be discovered,/He must keep on looking.” 

The voice of this poet often unveils emotional collisions, but the reader is spared sentimentality and mawkishness, his voice is true and accomplished; his lines resonate with the power of love that becomes authentic art.

Move over Dickinson and Frost, Francis and Wilbur… Amherst should be making a place for a poet’s “language, the mortar that binds." Kudos to Pinyon Publishing and Gary Entsminger for producing another banner book of poetry. The beautiful cover design is the art work of Susan Entsminger, co-editor of Pinyon Publishing.

Michael Miller was born in New York City and now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. His first book, The Joyful Dark, was the Editor’s Choice winner of the McGovern Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. His poem, “The Different War,” was the 2014 First Prize Winner of the W.B. Yeats Society Poetry Award and was anthologized in Yeats 150 (The Lilliput Press, Dublin).

Order Waking in the Dark from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403 or www.pinyon-publishing.com.

PINYON REVIEW #14

Cover of Pinyon Review #14 by Susan Entsminger

A few nights ago as I watched the PBS News Hour, I was pleasantly surprised to see a female poet appear in the last segment of the news. Ada Limon spoke passionately about the radical hope of poetry as an effective way of communicating and touted that people today are reading more and more poetry, exploring the nuance and mystery of it, as well as using it as a way to express rage. Limon also pointed out that poetry was a place where we admit to the unknown and sometimes practice beauty, make music from specificity and empathy. I was inwardly applauding her comments during the entire segment.

Gary and Susan Entsminger, editors and publishers of Pinyon Review, a magazine that features poetry, fiction, art, and photography, have been doing their share of touting the effectiveness of poetry for almost a decade in the pages of a literary journal that showcases the talents of a diverse group of artists from throughout the U.S. and abroad. In the latest issue showing the cover art of “Limes and Leaves” rendered by Susan Entsminger, the editors have chosen to include the translated work of several Chinese poets and a deceased Dutch poet, M. Vasalis, billed in her country as the “Dutch Elizabeth Bishop.” 

Although the work of other poets: Stuart Friebert, Neil Harrison, Gary Entsminger, Scott Davidson, to name a few, contributed highly notable work, I chose to showcase the Oriental poets who take readers farther afield to explore the “nuance and mystery” of Chinese poets the Muse inspires. Also impressive: “To A Tree,” a poem by the deceased Dutch poet, M. Vasalis, translated by Fred Lessing and David Young, which quickly sets the tone of international sharing on the opening pages of this issue of Pinyon Review.

As I’m a tree hugger, I appreciated the poet’s plea for trees not to move, “… for who could bear it if a tree pulled up its roots/and danced away?…” Vasalis muses on the eternal qualities of trees that [are not] “made to move,/in lengthy lines, like steady music, simple,/and then again stand still, a slender temple…I stood there in the wet and heavy grass/and felt that I had drifted into paradise…” Gary and Susan plan to publish a career-spanning selection of Vasalis’s poems in 2019. Interestingly, she was a Dutch psychiatrist who specialized in the treatment of children and was recognized as the most widely read and admired poet of her country.

In a long poem entitled “Crossing Lop Nor,” the Chinese poet Wang Ziliang, translated from the Chinese by Ajiu X. LI, divides the poem into sunset, land, sky wind, high wind, and ear into a medley that ends with a humorous musing about the ear; e.g., “It is said that Lop Nor/has the shape of an ear,/though never used to listen… Lop Nor, a metaphor about listening./A metaphor about sound and its fading… This ear/emblems how the gods achieved immortality/through enormous silence.” In this poem, as in many Oriental writings, nature offers specific philosophical commentary through “the sensual beauty of the land.” 

A self-translated poem by Langji Tianya, another Chinese poet featured in this issue, offers readers a meditation entitled “Like Calcium,” in which he “settles in a mountain pasture,/His meditation slides on a slope, the mass rises in a curved manner./The dead leaves cover themselves, the weeds go home/The fresh footprints on the piles of rocks will find the way of release.” Like Haiku, the featured poems by Chinese poets in this issue, aren’t understood quickly and include lines for the process of meditation. As Limon said in her broadcast, in poetry “we admit to the unknown.”

In this 14th edition, an intriguing article, “The Studio of The Three Arrows,” by Robert Elliott and Susan Entsminger features photography by 20th century photographer Harold A. Taylor who in his early 20’s hiked through Yosemite National Park to photograph its valley — “massive rocks, waterfalls, sequoias…” partnering with Eugene Hallett to open the Studio of the Three Arrows, so named for the Yosemite Miwok Indians and the English-born Taylor’s family crest. The photographs, as explained by Susan Entsminger and Robert Elliott, were created by using dry glass plates that produced sharp images and beautiful contrast. Susan’s grandfather, William T. Elliott, acquired the glass plate negatives when Taylor retired as he and Taylor had been in a photography business together. Elliott gave his son, R. Elliott, the Yosemite and California Missions Collection, which he is digitizing and archiving. The arresting photograph of “Wawona With Coach,” is a digital scan of one of Taylor’s beautiful glass plates. Photographs in this article provided by father and daughter make this 14th edition a real collector’s piece. 

Along with the Oriental poems, I couldn’t resist including the haiku of award-winning Gary Hotham who lives in Maryland; e.g., “outside the lines/our grandson includes more/with one crayon”… and “mixing with the afternoon sky/a lifetime of clouds/disappear.” Hotham has won first place in the Harold G. Henderson Memorial Haiku Awards and second place in the San Francisco International Haiku Competition. Pinyon published his Stone’s Throw, described as a book echoing the Japanese masters.

Pinyon Publishing just celebrated its tenth year as a publisher of quality literature and art in book form. Pinyon Review, a journal of the arts and sciences, is one of the few journals that has kept its mission of featuring emerging and well-known poets, fiction writers, translators, artists, and photographers. The magazine is produced in a log cabin on a plateau in southern Colorado where Gary and Susan share a life devoted to the cause of sustainability and quality publishing. On a personal note, they have consistently featured and supported my writing and reviewing of other writers’ work. Thank you, Pinyon, from all of your writers, photographers, and artists.

Available from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.