Robert Sund was a classic Northwest poet, the bard of Ish River country.
He studied under Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington but found a very different voice from the rest of Roethke’s prized students: Sund looked to the old Chinese masters for his poetic models.
Living in a shack on the Skagit River, within rowing distance of La Conner, he created a world for himself that felt “far, far back” in time, as he wrote.
Sund died in 2001, and his several small collections were gathered up in “Poems from Ish River Country” in 2005.
Now, Pleasure Boat Studio has brought out Sund’s “Notes from Disappearing Lake: The River Journals of Robert Sund,” edited by his friends Chip Hughes and Tim McNulty.
The entries — taken from small, thin, stitched Chinese journals Sund kept from 1973 to 1987 — read much like his poetry: acute, lyrical observation of the natural world, rendered with calligraphic spontaneity. He’s as attentive to the natural world as Thoreau and deceptively simple as the Tang poets he loved. His sympathy for the creatures of this world rival Issa’s. His feelings, often humorous, for the ever-present mice along the river recall Robert Burns.
“Even in muddy water/A man can row his boat and sing,” Sund writes. Communion with nature flows both ways: “I woke up with/last night’s ink on/my fingers,/and the birds were/singing a/fresh new song.”
Sund’s was a life devoted to poetry, like breathing. Even his smallest poetic gestures capture a place or a feeling. Here’s “Driving Across Whidbey Island”:
Old barns
where doors will
never open again.
Or this:
Alone again,
I see the silence still has
a home for me.
This is a modest book of 84 pages that opens gently the windows of perception. With a little help from his friends, Robert Sund is still giving back.
“Notes from Disappearing Lake: The River Journals of Robert Sund,” edited by Glenn Hughes and Tim McNulty. $15.
Hughes and McNulty will appear at The Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., on May 31 at 7 p.m.
— Mike Dillon