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Open Books: Events
October 09, 2007 07:30 PM
PAUL HUNTER & DAN MORRIS
Paul Hunter’s recent collection, Ripening ($14.95 Silverfish Review), is a vivid and vigorous collection of farming poems, a fine companion to his earlier volume, Breaking Ground. The world he conjures is one lost to most of us now, but his poems are not mournful. His intensely musical language, gift for imagery, and clear love of a story, no matter how small, bring the community of his younger self to life. Here are a ladle of well water, twice-daily milking, hayrides, yarnspinners around a stove, failed crops, a rusty tractor, and bushels of tomatoes. The poems do not shy from acknowledging loss—“What else is learned / from working outdoors in all weather / but the bloom lasts a moment”—yet they cannot help but praise and savor that short-lived blossom.
Following the Day is the title of Dan Morris’s new chapbook ($10 Pudding House), and it aptly suggests the careful attention exhibited in his quiet lyric poems. Plain-spoken, they are meditations that rise out of landscape, often a named place—a tree in Rexburg, Idaho; a road south of Okanogan, Washington; a bar in Troy, Montana. The specificity of their locations gives the poems an intimacy that heightens their understated poignancy. These are not solely descriptions of places; the human consciousness passing over and through them gives them their depth and color, and brings with it the understanding of inevitable sadness. Still, the poems are a gentle embrace of the world, a place where “what we thought was a stump of a piling / is actually moving and a couple holding close / in the dark.”
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