Tag: poems

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Bones Break Us Open

Just back from visiting a friend on Bone Mesa on the far side of Colorado, where snowy peaks towered over the mesa. Deer grazed on grass shoots at twilight. Blossoms from wild apricots blew along the dirt road like fallen stars. 

A poem practically wrote itself, in that moment. Except I didn’t write it down, but rather wandered around inside it, as happens when we realize we are actually walking through a poem, we are the poem, that the mesa is really bones, and the bones are poems.

My friend served lentil stew and fresh bread. A fire roared in the woodstove. The night grew transparent as a veil that the wind can lift, revealing that we aren’t in this world at all, but in the place where imagination lives, where we are fed on earth and stones. Where bones speak.

Bones more or less open Far Country, and in an invocation that may or may not have to do with every word that follows, we are reminded in the first poem that it is “Better to ask / what these bones will hatch, what lies, / curled, inside the shells of the dead.”

In “Blood City,” the ground we walk upon cobbled in fossilized snakes curled into balls, which turn to eggs. I can’t say that I always understand what the images that enter my poems say, but I trust and obey them. My friend and fellow writer Jennifer Ferraro read those lines as a call to perceive more deeply, to open our field of awareness to the memory of the land.

When I check my copy of The Book of Symbols, it says that bones suggest that something “hard” within psychic life endures beyond bodily death, and that a structure of ancestral experience supports us. In the Orthodox Church, the sweet smelling bones of saints are venerated as holy relics that bless us. Bones as bearers of life. Benediction and medicine.

Bones accompany the poet/speaker/me throughout the book–as talisman and key. There is an underworld called The Boneyard to be navigated. And in every poem, there is an invisible skeleton holding it up that is not, entirely, of this world.

The earth is a realm of bone on bone, in all the ways that can be understood. It can hurt to be here, magnificent as the scenery might be. Throughout the struggles, bones remind us that something unseen supports us, lies hidden within the known world, bears new life within what is buried.

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Soul Boats: Poems as Vessel

Cover art  ‘Bardsey Boats” ink and gold leaf on found wood from Bardsey Island, 2017 by Jake Lever.

I encountered the boats on the cover of Far Country in Soul on Deck, a story in Image Magazine about their creator Jake Lever and his series of installations called “Soul Boats.” It was love at first sight. I tore the page with the fleet of Bardsey Boats out and pinned it over my desk. They became a beacon as I wrote and re-wrote this book.

As letters “written” in symbolic language, these boats seem to me not so much image as an invocation, a means of engagement, a mode of travel. For how else can one reach the distant lands promised in the title Far Country? Particularly given that they aren’t exactly places one can reach in ordinary ways.

My draw to the image was strengthened by Jake’s description of the process behind their creation, as described in the Image Magazine story:

Jake Lever’s artist statement in Image Magazine

I love this example of art making via deep engagement with place and its inherent mythologies, a process of seeing, exploring, collecting, shaping, marking, sharing. What beautiful instructions for artists working in any medium. It makes me wonder, how can my poems engage directly and tangibly with the place they arise from? What is it they might offer to others, or back to the land? What can they listen for in the silence? Where might they travel?

As you can see, I was deeply struck by Bardsey Boats, a response that doesn’t surprise their creator. In a recent email, Jake wrote to me,

“Simple pre-industrial boat forms seem to get “under the door” and seep into the soul like no other image.  There is something primal around the vessel cradling/nurture/protecting at birth and yet offering safe passage across the threshold from life into death. All very mysterious, primal and wonderful – beyond intellect and more to do with intuition, ancestors and spirit life.  They have given me so much and I am still learning from them.”

From Soul on Deck, Image Magazine. Another of Jake’s boats, on a much larger scale, with sage advice from CPE we might all carry us with us right now.

Boat as imagination, as consciousness, as body. These are the things that carry us across the deep waters of life. These boats helped me to recognize the ways in which this book is about loss, change, and grief on many levels–the transformations we face in our individual lives, the large scale ecological shifts taking place around us, and the collective atrocities and unraveling we are amidst.

Perhaps the boats are keys, or symbols that open the way. Adorning a book cover, they become the door that is literally opened. Given how much time the speaker in many of these poems spends looking for doors and keys, that is fortuitous indeed.

Pinned over my desk as I worked on the manuscript.

Visually, the Bardsey Boats appear to me as a poem—perhaps each is word in a gloriously spare poem, or a stanza made of thin couplets descending down the page. Or perhaps each one is an individual poem, and they are a sequence in which the image shape shifts and transforms.

Most of all, I love the reversal of this image—to imagine each of the poems in Far Country becoming a boat. A vessel, a fleet of vessels like these inked and gilded bits of driftwood.

May they, too, carry the reader between worlds.

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Out of the Depths: Introducing Far Country

Here I am, friends, like an underground river rising to the surface once again. The occasion is a celebration: my new poetry collection, Far Country, arrives into the world March 4th thanks to University of Nevada Press. Oh, happy day!

(Cover art Bardsey Boats, from the beautiful series of “Soul Boats” by Jake Lever. )

Please join me in person or virtually for the official book launch at Collected Works Bookstore Wednesday, March 12 at 6pm. The event will include a reading from Far Country followed by a conversation with the wonderful poet and friend to the earth, Anne Haven McDonnell. I am so excited to see where we go together…

Well, what can I tell you about this newborn book?

Five years in the making, these poems are my attempt to explore the unknowable–a landscape transformed by climate change, motherhood turned into crucible, and the unmapped territory in which loss becomes a medium of deepening connection and love.  

There are poems about herb lore, the imaginal realm, the flourishing earth. It’s filled with signs from the stars and the moon, and a new relationship to faith taking shape quietly in the background. There is a midwife, a daughter in trouble, and other wounded healers. There are deer. Springtime, for sure. There is drought and dry rivers, and moths. There is heartbreak and mercy. There are loads of keys.

“Far Country” refers to the world we have left behind, the future we are hurtling towards, and the foreign, disoriented present. It is the ground we stand upon when we have lost our bearings. It is a place of spiritual exile, longing, and return. To reach there, these poems traverse worlds both seen and unseen, fusing them into a rich tapestry of lyric exploration and wonder.

I invite you to travel to those lands and walk alongside me for a bit. Far Country is available from your favorite independent bookseller.

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Given the long lapses I’ve had writing here, I have come to see this space, once so wide ranging and free flowing, as an ephemeral river. Perhaps it flows under the surface during dry years, or gets diverted to other channels, or drops into other dimensions entirely, like the rio abajo rio that lies out of sight even as it waters our souls from the depths.

But now, to honor the arrival of this new book, I have in mind a brief season of posting a companion guide to the poems. Things like the practice of poetry as numinous art, what it means to write “ecologically,” the crucial role of imagination in these times, and other landmarks I used to navigate into and out of Far Country. Oh, and I can’t wait to tell you more about those beautiful boats on the cover.

I hope you’ll join me. Subscribe for best coverage! We’ll see what the river picks up in its meandering, and what it has to carry up from the silence underground.