Nature poems link Kentucky to ancient China

By Chris Collins Contributing Writer

Field Work: Modern PoemsFrom Eastern ForestsEdited by Erik Reece. University Press of Kentucky. 152 pp. $19.95.

In the forward to Field Work, a new book of ­collected poems assembled and edited by Erik Reece, he tells us there are only two species of the tulip poplar tree found in the world: the incomparably straight and lofty specimen found in most of the eastern United States, and the one found halfway around the world in China.

Beyond the tulip poplar, Reece goes on to say that the Appalachian and southern Chinese forests also share the may apple, jack-in-the-pulpit and ginseng. Wondering why so many of the American nature poets he admired reminded him of the ancient Chinese masters, Reece had an epiphany: Both were responding to the same landscape.

Beyond landscape, they also now share space in Field Work: Modern Poems From Eastern Forests. Wanting to emphasize man's appreciation of nature rather than his destruction of it, Reece — after spending a year in Perry County, watching the slow destruction of Lost Mountain because of mountaintop ­removal and writing about it in his first book, Lost Mountain — collected a book of poetry that celebrates the forests and hills in our Kentucky back yard.

Except for the ancient Chinese nature poets, every poet in the book comes from east of the Mississippi River. And excepting Robert Frost's The Oven Bird, every poem was written after World War II. Field Work is a book of collected poems that speak to the healthiness of maintaining a close connection to our natural environment. It is also a book that reiterates the natural world as muse.

Reece opens Field Work with The Oven Bird. In Lost Mountain, he quoted The Oven Bird and answered the last line of the poem phrased as a question: ”What to make of a diminished thing?“ by ­referring to the blasted face of Lost Mountain. In contrast, in Field Work, Frost's poem is a starting point for the poems that follow and seek to articulate nature's beauty.

In the first part of Field Work, we hear from the poets of ancient China: Li Po, Wang Wei, Tu Fu and Han Shan, and enter into an emerald, mystical world where it is hard to discern the poet from the natural world. Consider the following poem from Han Shan:

I delight in the everyday Way, myself

Among mist and vine, rock and cave,

wildlands feeling so boundlessly free,

White clouds companions in idleness.

Roads don't reach those human realms.

You only climb this high in no-mind:

I sit here on open rock: a lone night,

A full moon drifting up Cold Mountain.

Of course this is coming from a man who named himself after a mountain, but after reading the rest of the Chinese poets in part one of Field Work, you can tell why Reece refers to them as the ”first great "nature writers.'“ Their words flow across the page; they evoke images of timelessness and the natural world lasting forever. Even when Wang Wei, a government bureaucrat, mentions himself in his poem, In Reply to Vice-Magistrate Chang, it is with a world-weariness that is erased by the ­rejuvenating power of nature. Only in nature can Wang Wei's ”mind be free of our ten thousand affairs.” It seems that even the ancient Chinese were not immune to political ambition and the whims of their ­tyrannical bosses.

From the ancient Chinese poets, we move to part two of Field Work, introduced by a series of poems from Eastern Kentucky poet James Still. Still takes up the question of pondering diminishing things in When the Dulcimers Are Gone and hits us a little closer to home. Now we know we are not in a timeless, mystical place, but rather an environment of vague impending doom ­— and it's in our own back yard.

But it's a back yard in which, for all its danger, Still vows to remain. You don't get much more steadfast than Still, who spent more than a half century in a log house in Hindman, writing classic verse. In the poems Reece has collected here: Wilderness; Heritage; I Was Born Humble; Hill-Lonely; Epitaph for Uncle Ira Combs, Mountain Preacher; and River Earth, Still defines himself by the surrounding hills. It is pride in the hills that made Still's Uncle Ira think ”all earth is dull that did not tower up.“

From Still's reflective incantations we go next to James Wright, Lorine Niedecker, A.R. Ammons, Hayden Carruth and Denise Levertov. While their poems stand on their own, gone is the sense of place that imbued Still's poems with unabashed pride. When Wright is walking along a fence row and watching two squirrels gather nuts in his poem Late November in a Field, we have no idea where he is or how he feels about where he is.

And then slowly, nature begins to take a back seat to the poets themselves. In Niedecker's The Death of My Poor Father, in between taxes and settling her father's estate, Niedecker offhandedly mentions owning a book of Chinese poems and a pair of binoculars to look at river trees before she dies. ­Ammons attempts to re-create the style of the ancient Chinese masters in Delaware Water Gap, but his stilted phrasing tends to distract from the feeling of freedom he wishes to convey.

Wendell Berry returns us to poems that meld man and nature seamlessly. Like Wang Wei's In Reply to Vice-­Magistrate Chang, Berry, in The Peace of Wild Things, seeks tranquillity from the world's grief by immersing himself in nature. In I Know for a While Again, Berry, lost in the reverence of a winter sunset, remarks on nature's power to offer thoughts of immortality through self forgetfulness.

Field Work is a special book of poetry. Singular in its selection of poets yet narrow in subject matter, this small book speaks volumes about the effect nature can have on those who choose to seek its beauty.