The last few months have seen noteworthy additions to the Pacific Northwest poetry canon. All three sources have North Seattle connections
The last few months have seen noteworthy additions to the Pacific Northwest poetry canon. All three sources have North Seattle connections.
'TAOS MOUNTAIN'
In April, Poet's House Press in Anacortes published"Taos Mountain," a posthumous collection by Robert Sund. Sund, who died in 2001 at age 71, is a Northwest legend: poet, calligrapher, musician and personage who seemed to have stepped out of the mists of the Tang Dynasty.
He was also one of the more accomplished students to come out of poet Theodore Roethke's classroom at the University of Washington in the mid-1950s.
It's good to have another book of poems by Robert Sund.
It's not good that it's a hardcover, coffee-table-type book costing $60.
Some of Sund's Seattle friends grumble that this is not his best work, that he was a Northwest boy and his muse didn't follow him to New Mexico on a 1991 hiatus.
The book is illustrated by Sund's "blanket" paintings - also not his best work, certain friends say.
Well, it's a beautiful, lovingly produced book - it's just too expensive. It's also strikingly at odds with Sund's life and work. That's what happens sometimes when a trust is set up to further the legacy of the departed.
Though this is no "Bunch Grass" or "Ish River," these poems do come from Robert Sund, and he wanted them published - that counts for something.
'RIPENING'
Meanwhile, upper Fremont's Paul Hunter - poet, publisher, woodworker, teacher, musician, instrument-maker, artist - recently appeared in a five-minute segment on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour," one of those real-people profiles the digitized world sometimes stops long enough to be curious about.
Hunter is owner and operator of Woodworks, which issues durable and enduring chapbooks of poetry from a C&P letterpress he operates in his basement.
His just-issued book of poems is "Ripening," from Silverfish Review Press, follows on the heels of "Breaking Ground," which won the 2005 Washington Book Award for poetry.
Hunter's farm poems capture life when people worked with their hands, understood where their food came from and where stuff goes when the toilet flushes. In other words, he's something of a throwback.
Hunter's poems are energetic, wry, tactile. Consider this simple sequence: "Say spring too wet for plowing/runs axle-deep into July."
It's the kind of timeless, compressed reality not accessible to many writers nowadays.
'LIMBS OF THE PINE'
David Horowitz, publisher of Rose Alley Press, has been issuing well-made books of poetry for the past decade-plus with the accent on poetry's formal qualities: rhyme, meter, music, the play and possibilities of language.
Horowitz, himself a poet and a University District resident, is a tireless supporter of the poets he publishes.
His "Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range," an anthology of 26 poets, came out in June. Poets include Michael Spence, J. Andrew Rodriguez, Sharon Hashimoto, Derek Sheffield, Richard Wakefield, Joannie K. Strangeland and Victoria Ford.
Most of these poets work in the poetic tradition that Roethke taught - no faux-Ginsburg here.
"Limbs" deserves to be read.
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