Poetry
78 Pages
ISBN: 0-910055-18-1
Cloth: $18.00
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The great risk in writing poems deeply centered in a specific place is that they will receive the disparaging tag of "regional" poetry. This is especially true in the Pacific Northwest, though a handful of poets maintained their vision of place and rose to national recognition (Robinson Jeffers, William Everson, Gary Snyder, and John Haines, among others). Samuel Green has accepted the risk in his first full-length collection, Vertebrae. The results are quiet, gentle poems rooted in the soil where he lives, loves, and works.
In the summer of 1982, Samuel Green moved with his wife and young son from a suburban Seattle house to a remote island off the coast of Northwest Washington. For three years he and his family lived in a surplus army tent, hauling their water from a neighbor?s well, heating with wood, and lighting their dim canvas home with kerosene lamps, before finally moving into a log house they built themselves. The poems in Vertebrae (most of them available before now only in finely printed limited editions) chronicle Green's dissatisfaction with urban living, the move to a life in the woods where he began a new search for meaning through work and love, and a final shift to the struggle to live rightly while acknowledging the inevitable inability to isolate himself from an increasingly, violent and needy world. While Green's subjects are the daily routines of work, and the relationships of family and community, his themes are as old as literature, spiritual longing, the conflict between good and evil, and a joyful awe in the face of the natural world.
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| Editor, publisher, bookbinder, calligrapher, teacher, Samuel Green has long had a following in the Northwest where he has a reputation as a sort of "outlaw" poet, having chosen a different path from the common "career" poet of his day. |
"On the whole, Vertebrae is a proficient first book, and a promising introduction to a poet whose development will be interesting to follow. Although Green may be labeled a regionalist on the basis of this collection, it is a dramatic region in which to write, a land of harsh rains and hard stone, tall cedars and winds and the sea. Within this landscape, Green's poems are generous and compassionate, a kind of intimacy every region needs in its poets." , ...........................................
—William Harryman |
