Review of Poets on Place

Poets on Place
Interviews & Tales from the Road

W.T. Pfefferle and his wife decided to hit the road in a Winnebago one day in search of poetry. Admittedly, an unusual thing to do. But the two of them, he a professor and she a t.v. exec., had a decades-long yen for freedom that they couldn't say no to and so off they went. Given that they were sacrificing their sense of place, the pursuit of poetry naturally followed the scent of home, whether permanent or transitional, and what could possibly be more like home than nature itself. Coursing across America, and not always in a straight line, Pfefferle and his wife asked 61 poets how place informed their work, and they received a delightful variety of informed answers.

Linda Gregerson estimated that impact of place on her work was "huge and incalculable. . . I'm sure that space and material place have consequences far beyond my conscious awareness." Most of the poets agreed wholeheartedly, but they didn't always have the same definition of place. For instance, Mark Strand found a sense of place and structure in any room he inhabited or imagined. For him, the universe was vast, the sky frighteningly large, and a room provided security and the space to explore one's inner landscape. This is not to say that he ignored nature all together. Far from it. Like many poets, he tended to hearken back to his childhood environment when crafting his poems and, for him, this meant Nova Scotia. "I still think of being on the water, near the water, picking blueberries. St. Margaret's Bay. Sailing, Going out with Albert the fisherman, dropping a line, and catching a cod." And in his poem "A Morning," this formative experience sets the backdrop for one of his rooms, this one created in the midst of the natural world. "I looked over the gunwale and saw beneath the surface/ a luminous room, a light-filled grave, saw for the first time/ the one clear place given to us when we are alone."

This is a brilliant portrayal of our inner and outer landscapes serving one another as alternate, yet intimately connected, realities. Michael Dennis Browne also pulls from nature to come to terms with his own psyche and the course of his life. His verse is luminous as it depicts maturation of self through the seasons. He writes "as if one afternoon/ the summer begins/ to accept her age/ the lines in/ her face ease/ and yellowjackets/ begin to wander/ out of the crevices." Browne's poetry depicts the lovely ease of self, as well as nature, that so many of us are reaching for these days. And the book, poets on place, is filled with gems like this just waiting for discovery from the sensitive reader. By the way, it's also sprinkled with Pfefferle's delightful humor without and is an all-round great summer read.