Notable Books by North Carolina Writers: August, 2006

An invitation. . .
How many times have I heard the saying, "Throw a rock (or whatever else comes to mind, something nonviolent, I hope) in North Carolina and you'll hit a writer!" Well, throw a lariat, as I like to think I'm doing, and you'll pull in some books worth adding to your collection, your nightstand, your life.

I hope this "book of the month" feature does just that: reels in some books by North Carolina writers, most of them by poets -- but not always. Sharing books we like is one of the pleasures of life, as far as I'm concerned. It's like passing on a memorable recipe or a personal story of how some writer's words made the world become more alive, more mysterious, more hospitable. These books invite you to enter them and be a part of their experience.

--Kathryn Stripling Byer, Poet Lariat, ex-cowgirl and devotee of Roy Rogers and Lash LaRue

Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, by Thomas Rain Crowe

(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005)

When we go into the world to discover "Nature," the first nature we discover is our own. We discover it in the living silence beyond our radios and music players, in the darkness that our turbines and light bulbs work to obliterate. We discover the meaning of solitude; whatever the community in our minds, we come upon the experience of the fundamental aloneness that surrounds us (and inhabits us) in isolation. There's safety in numbers, as the saying goes, and not so much otherwise; it can be scary out (& in) there. But there is something else that comes, eventually, with that isolation, something quite extraordinary: a sense of place in the world, a defining particularity.

Whatever the losses involved, it's a clarifying experience, one that allows us to hear, finally, the voices that sound in our own heads and hearts, and so enter with a new clarity the dialogue that defines us, assess its terms, and come to a new sense of the world which includes us.

We're social creatures, we humans, so we'll almost always seek out the other such critters in the neighborhood, however dispersed they might be. And it behooves us to befriend them, and learn, if we can, what they know of life in the shared world where we stand.

It's such a voyage into a place and its community that Thomas Rain Crowe undertakes with honesty, humor, grace, and insight in Zoro's Field.

The account of that voyage alone would be enough to make this book a rich delight. But, as they say, there's more. Nature and native are both derived from the Latin nat-, the stem of nasci, to be born. When we are born, we are born to a particular place. There's a sense in which most of us grow up and become "at home" in an unconscious way in the territory that surrounds us, wherever it happens to be. But we can also come to know a place another way: consciously. And when we do, whatever the occasion, there's a sense in which we can be reborn by the encounter, and become "new natives" of the places we inhabit. It's to such a deepening engagement that Thomas Rain Crowe invites us here. And he makes the case persuasively that there's much to be gained (for all) by entering such a relationship, and by rediscovering our kinship, our kind-ness, with the myriad creatures of the world where we, with all our technologies, play such a decisive part. In this era of inconvenient ecological truths, his is a voice that needs to be heard. -- Jeff Davis

Jeff Davis is a writer who lives in western North Carolina. Poems from his most recent collection, published in May, follow the excerpt immediately below from Zoro's Field.

From the chapter entitled "Johnson's Pond":

"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."
-- Henry David Thoreau, "The Ponds," Walden

A sanctuary for wild birds, forest animals of all kinds, and a diverse population of fish, I go down to the pond by way of a trail that follows a spring branch through a wee glen of trillium, wild sarsaparilla, and Solomon's seal and ends at the water on a west bank, where, in the shallows, bream make their beds and breed in the muddy bottom. Where trout and bass jump, biting at insects invisible to the eye. Where mallards and wild geese lay their eggs under the boxwoods and in the high grass, and turtles wander around almost aimlessly as if drunk on their own muse. So quiet, so serene, so filled with a sense of the bucolic is the energy (what the Buddhists call "chi") of this place. I come here to witness the windfall of nature's wealth in beauty. I love this place and its ongoing continuity of self-sufficiency and subsistence -- all carried on without the assistance of human hands. The balance it has achieved is a kind of perfection that inspires me in my daily tasks of trying to scrape together a crude life for myself up the road amidst much rougher terrain.

It is spring and I have come down the hill from the cabin to be beside the pond. I park myself on a south-facing bank in a soft bed of crowfoots and moss and just lie, for the sake of lying, in the noonday sun. I spend an afternoon watching the Rorschach of clouds, the migration of birds, the way the wind choreographs the dance of the upper limbs of white pine, tulip poplar, and silver maple on the ridgetops that surround. Propped up on an elbow, chewing on a blade of long, green grass, I can see the large snappers coming up from the bottom of the pond for air. Their long necks and small heads poking out of the water like apostrophes renegade from words. A water snake swims leisurely, undulating, creating ripples, as it makes it way into reeds on the opposite side of the pond. A ruffed grouse drums somewhere off in the woods to the north. A pond frog tries, like an aging rock star, to sing...

When Thoreau wrote about Walden Pond, it was often from the perspective of his boat. A small canoe. Sitting in the still water, looking down, watching the perch play on the ribbed bottom, while playing the flute. Charmed by the fish and his own music. Lying beside my pool of water, my Walden Pond, I feel as Thoreau must have felt, agreeing that my pond, like his, is "a perfect forest mirror."

Each time I come into this watery clearing in the woods, whether I enter by dusty roadway or by way of the spring-branch path, I feel the same expansive opening and sense of well-being. It feels a lot like what I felt at Walden Pond during a single day there a few years ago, swimming, hiking, and sitting amongst beech trees in a grove. I took a smooth white rock from the bottom of Walden Pond the day I swam there. That stone now sits on my writing desk in the cabin. It is a tangible link between Walden Pond and Johnson's Pond. Between north and south. Between past and present. Between Thoreau and Crowe.

#

A Pond in the Woods

There are answers in the ponds at night.
Like the silence of fish.
How many wheels are turning in these woods?
Little lives
unseen in the dark
as I walk alone by the lantern-light presence of moon.
For those who don't die,
their lives are like the time that is locked up in rocks.
Stones thrown sleeping into
the bottom of the pond
where bream bed and are born
to the water in flight.
This night
like remembered moonlight
reflected in the eyes of owls.

Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published writer and the author of twelve books of original and translated works. He was a founding editor of Katuah Journal: A Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians, which Gary Snyder called the best bioregional publication in the U.S. His memoir Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, written in the style of Thoreau's Walden and based on four years of self-sufficient living in a wilderness environment in the woods of western North Carolina from 1979 to 1982, won the 2005 Ragan Old North State Award for the best book of nonfiction by a North Carolina writer, as well as the Southern Environmental Law Center's Philip Reed Book of the Year Award for environmental writing. It was also a finalist in the Independent Publishers Book Awards for Regional Non-Fiction.

Mr. Crowe lives along the Tuckasegee River in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. He writes features, editorials, and columns on culture, community, and the environment for the Smoky Mountain News. As an activist, he has been involved since 1979 with such issues and organizations as The Canary Coalition (Clean Air), AMUSE (Artists and Musicians United for a Safe Environment), and the Project to Protect Native American Sacred Sites in the S. Appalachians. He has been on the board of the Southern Biodiversity Project and the Environmental Leadership Council for western North Carolina. Duke University's special collections library recently bought his literary archive.

NatureS: Selected Poems, 1972 - 2005, by Jeff Davis, with illustrations by Joyce Blunk

(Cullowhee, NC: New Native Press, 2006)

Being human and part of nature, what we have in common with the natural world is something we gain then lose, gain then lose, over and over. The continual process of holding and letting go makes up the world we smell, we taste, we see, we feel, we hear, we share. As the custodian of this experience we have none better than Jeff Davis. He has been tireless in his practice of recording these dark and luminous encounters: the flicker of love, or the shadow of leaves in the wind.

So we find out in a poem of his:

There's nothing to remember,
Nothing to regret,
Nothing to forget,
Nothing to gather,
nothing left to spill, so
let the bucket drop
into the sea to fill ....

His perceptions offer an unbounded generosity everywhere they appear: in print, on the radio, and on the Internet. He's forever pulling things into focus, then allowing them to fade. His voice is a constantly present "I" -- not solitary but one that invites fellowship. -- Thomas Meyer

Thomas Meyer lives in the woods in western North Carolina looking out upon the Nantahala range at the southern end of the Appalachians. His most recent books are Coromandel (Austin, TX: Skanky Possum, 2003) and, this year, his translation of the ancient Chinese classic, the daode jing (Tao Te Ching), published by Flood Editions (Chicago). His poems were featured on this web site in May, 2005.

The Cotyledon

Two lovers lie
together, like two
leaves
inside the finished seed
bound asleep
to the root
the long tunnels
& subway
paths
which end nowhere:
a door
through which each day
drop by drop
a river seeps from the rock
and rises
through their
flesh into morning.

The Bridge

The syntax of a magnolia
unravels in the dream
each flower passes      into
a trajectory
through forms
a long bridge
leads from the earth
through these limbs
all built
by the eye of the seed
turned in the root's spiral
from veil to
veil
a bridge cast
from the ash of
the flower
                grateful
dead    charred
petals channel the air.

The Bird Returning to Its Nest
(after the painting by George Braque)

Back. Back to the nest,
a cave, a boat
on the sea of earth,
to live in it.
Some haste to the form
of her flight,
               she comes
from fields of wheat
& rose hedges
which have filled her wings' shadows.
She might have flown
nowhere, her eyes cooling
obsidian.
She is tired, but it is more simple.
She does not arc down
for one night only.
She is given:
Like an anchor,
she does not move her wings
into this depth,
this dream
she remembers
as she returns
to the nest and three eggs
empty of everything
but the descent.

Toward Pisgah

Of world we make
the mind      and it becomes
all we know

and the actual real
lies      always still

beyond the horizons
of our words
our dream of world

lost if not engaged,

but easily unseen, lost
in another way,
in the encounter.

Elevated   Pisgah
by earth's energy
the tellurian collisions

now a mile high - not
great as mountains go -

no Sagarmatha -
but eons older, and
in its own
range, the ridge
in which it was
cast up
has its own presence.
Its peak defines
its particularity, and
its mass merges with
more   north
south and west
to define its own
high country:

Nantahala,
Cullasaja,
Tuckasegee -
no matter which way
descended from its slopes
the rivers gather in one
direction:    West.

Without Last Words

Some life stilled in the resin of her eyes,
trapped in their amber,
frozen, unable to open its wings and fly.

Inside, still the echo
of the flight struggling to escape:
the wings up, forceful, cold.

Or like a magnolia
cased in ice by the late snow,
the whole bough broken

off, fallen,
and not yet dead
but without another way to go.

And the Bird Returning ...

Spring has not yet
broken
and the landscape
(just implicit
and unseen
beyond the focus
of this moment,
beyond the canvas
and unpainted)
remains
dark.

Or is it rather
autumn,
and these eggs,
unseasonal,
open to
a different life,
to fly
through snow?

Last Words

We saw a light
some place along the way
and our sight hung
fire some
concurrence
blazed wood and air
wed   before
fire folded in the dark
hid seed    in the sleep
of night   & went
a way another
place    vanished
smoke   words
flares    ash
buried in the high air.

Jeff Davis grew up in Charlotte, received degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the State University of New York, and also attended the MFA program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. From 1972 to 1975 he apprenticed to a native carver of ceremonial masks and totem poles in Alert Bay, British Columbia. He taught anthropology and history classes at the University of North Carolina at Asheville for a decade, and has otherwise worked as a baker, cook, photographer, informational writer for a public agency, computer network administrator, and consultant. He was active in the communities of poets in Buffalo and Vancouver, British Columbia, and now develops programs in poetry for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, in Asheville. In addition to NatureS, he's published a limited-edition chapbook, Transits of Venus.

It was in Asheville that he met, through the good offices of Thomas Rain Crowe, artist Joyce Blunk. Blunk was born on the Iowa prairie but has lived in the North Carolina mountains for the past twenty-nine years. Her paintings and box sculptures have been exhibited in Europe (France, Germany, and Ireland), Asia (Taiwan), and North America (Canada, Mexico and throughout the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii). She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa. She has received fellowships and residency grants from the North Carolina Arts Council and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, among other awards. She has had foreign residency fellowships in Austria, Ireland, France, and Germany. Her home and studio are in Asheville.