Books

Trio adds to surge of work pouring forth from Alaska poets

Today I Caught Your Spirit

By Frank Keim; Sentinel Printing Co.; 112 pages; 2014; $15

Archives of the Air

By John Morgan; Salmon Poetry; 70 pages; 2015; $12

A Ladder of Cranes

By Tom Sexton; University of Alaska Press/Alaska Literary Series; 72 pages; 2015; $14

It seems to be poetry season in Alaska with two widely published poets and a relative unknown publishing books covering similar ground with differing results. Each employs stark and minimal language while exploring Alaska and lands beyond. Along the way, they encounter nature, life, death, poets who preceded them, ecology, human existence and mortality.

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Frank Keim of Fairbanks is primarily known as a wilderness activist and essayist. Accounts of his backcountry explorations are extensively detailed narratives that progress at a walker's pace as he traverses a piece of land, noting countless details of plant and animal life along the way. His knowledge of Alaska's natural world is vast, but for some readers his essays might be too information-rich.

Thus, it's nice to see him dabble in poetry with "Today I Caught Your Spirit," in which he distills his long-form style down to a minimalism that will gently encourage easily distracted urban dwellers to pause for a few moments and pay attention to the many manifestations of life swirling around them.

Those details could be minute or massive. While admiring a large tree, Keim notices:

"An inch worm just / dropped / by a silken thread / to / my pant leg and / I lift him on my pencil nib / to watch / as he leans his inching green body out / then / falls / down / on your sinuous piled roots, / looking like a tiny snake / ready to shed its skin."

Two pages later, he finds himself at the other end of the size range, facing down a grizzly near Emmonak: "I caught the safety with my thumb and pointed, / but you charged and I yelled / STOP! and you stopped / and I sternly warned you / Don't do it! / and you did / lowering your heavy head / of blunt chocolate fur / and lifting the five dagger claws / of your left paw ..."

Keim escaped that one with a warning shot, but it serves as a reminder that nature is indifferent and not the loving mother some mistake it for. Violence is key to nature's continuation.

Trip down Chitina River

Keim travels beyond Alaska, including to his beloved Southwest, but John Morgan, a more established poet also from Fairbanks, doesn't stop at the U.S. border. Widely published nationally and known in Fairbanks for his work with the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Creative Writing Program, "Archives of the Air" is Morgan's second book in little more than a year.

His previous work, "River of Light," was a narrative account of a trip down the Chitina River. This time around, he offers a hodgepodge of short pieces and one longer one that wander back and forth between Alaska and the world beyond.

Some of these poems come from a residency in Denali National Park, where sudden movement catches his eye. "Nature, great creator, full / of invention, fabrication. / Day ten, went for a good-by look / to the bank of the East Fork, glacial / river, thick grey water. Suddenly / a head pokes up. A fish, an / otter? There's no telling."

Soon the answer is clear as the creature pursues a duck and again the violence of nature plays out. For the otter to live, the duck must die.

Nature's indifference doesn't overlook humans. On a trip to Seattle, Morgan encounters a homeless woman and writes, "Living solo at the invalids hotel, / hot flashes, no libido, diarrhea, / sleeping not so well (rude facts / that overrun your fate)."

Morgan also visits war zones, pausing for a couple of pages to consider John Walker Lindh, the infamous "American Taliban" who was captured when U.S. troops entered Afghanistan. "As hair / and beard grew wild, he mixed with / the sons of tribesmen, no longer / a skittish child, and girded himself / to fight."

In the narrative poem at the center of this book, Morgan boards a canoe on the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks and heads downstream, his mind drifting between the present and seemingly all else. It's a piece akin to "River of Light" where elation and loss form the current.

Great loneliness

Former Alaska Poet Laureate Tom Sexton has been in the northland for more than half a century and has written extensively about it. In "A Ladder of Cranes" he begins on America's northeastern coast and travels across Canada and into Alaska in what is not intended as a narrative poem but nonetheless emerges as a linear work.

Sexton is another observer drawn to tiny details. While examining a statue of a Union soldier out east, he sees a now-forgotten man no longer noticed by residents of the town the statue stands in, where "An orb spider has spun a web between / the bayonet on his rifle and his shoulder."

There's a great loneliness in these poems. In Western Alberta as he heads toward Alaska, Sexton writes, "I imagine a woman staring at the frozen / landscape of Alberta from the narrow window / of a house just big enough to hold two / souls in harness, that and little more."

Sexton's work has a humor as well, something missing from the other two books. He can ruminate on man's destruction of nature, but many of these brief poems close with a twist that somehow lightens them. In one poem a cow moose and a magpie both visit his yard at once, but he notes with relief at the end that "They pass my window heading west / toward my neighbor's tulip bed."

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All three poets philosophize on nature and mourn man's impact upon it, but it's Sexton, echoing perhaps the most famous of all Carl Sagan quotes, who says what all three understand: that we are a part of it.

"We have star marrow in our bones," he writes, "star marrow."

David A. James is a Fairbanks-based writer and critic.

David James

David A. James is a Fairbanks-based freelance writer, and editor of the Alaska literary collection “Writing on the Edge.” He can be reached at nobugsinak@gmail.com.

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