I’ve never thought of myself as a poetry reader. It’s always been a challenge for me to lose myself in poems. I often feel like I am reading one line and then the next, but they never quite add up and when I’m finished I feel like everything I own is scattered all over the house.
I recently watched Jane Campion’s film Bright Star about British poet John Keats, and in the film he tells his soon-to-be sweet heart:
“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”
I am still a little shy of the water, which is to say, I don’t read poetry often, but this past year I found myself drawn to books of poetry I otherwise wouldn’t have picked up, two by friends who I hadn’t realized were poets. The element that drew me in was not actually water; it was earth. I read and then reread three books in particular by women currently living in Oregon or who grew up here, and they seemed to be in conversation with each other: Philomath by Devon Walker-Figueroa (Milkweed Editions, 2021); Dirt Eaters by Eliza Rotterman (Tupelo Press, 2018); and Each Leaf Singing by Caroline Boutard (Moonpath Press, 2021).
Each writer is at a different stage in her life: one is younger, still sloughing off the skin of her youth. Her memories of adolescence are vivid and visceral, filled with acute observations of pain and strangeness. The second poet is a young mother, perceiving the world she sees before her with a sense of lustiness and also disappointment. The third is a farmer in her seventies who is facing death and reflecting on the life she has chosen and the many instances when she has witnessed life as it expires. Their styles are radically different, but they share a fixation on tactile feelings of the earth and the creatures that inhabit it, a deep connection to exactly the places where their feet are touching the ground, and the power of their storytelling.
Philomath is the name of an Oregon town I’ve driven through in the most beating rainstorm of my life, a place where trees grow very tall and timber used to be a primary industry. Philomath, as poet Devon Walker-Figueroa points out early in her collection, also means love of learning. Walker-Figueroa spent part of her childhood there, and most of it, as far as I can gather, in nearby rural places of Oregon with her back-to-land wine-grape-growing father and all the bugs, animals, ghosts, and weirdos that cohabitated with them.
The titular poem, “Philomath,” is about friendship, witnessing, and powerlessness; it presents the most immediate experience of teenage innocence being obliterated that I can imagine and haunted me for weeks. It took me a few days to go further, I was so rattled. Walker-Figueroa’s writing is unrelenting and entrancing, like a story being told by someone who spares no detail and layers meaning on meaning. In “King’s Valley,” she writes, “It seems we’ll get by / with our lie a little longer, if only / because the nematodes are failing / to save the Yukon Golds & the thistle is / going to seed & Mark, a family / friend who happens to be hard / up, is sleeping on the couch, asking us / to call him Lucky like it’s Desert / Storm all over again.” Several moments in this passage stop me in my tracks, especially the line that reads, “friend who happens to be hard” before the line break, and then “up,” implying for me a sense of awareness of men’s sexuality, even the men who are family friends, who are “hard up.”
This is submersion in a lake and the tingling, freezing, acclimating, weightless sensations that come with that. More than the other two collections, I felt challenged and a little drugged by this book. Walker-Figueroa’s poems are lengthy and toggle between the cerebral and the tactile in a free-ranging way. I was most struck by the latter, the moments when I felt physical sensations of discomfort and powerlessness. In addition to water, I often felt lost in a dense brambles; I could really feel the thorns and smell the dirt and fruit.
Eliza Rotterman’s collection Dirt Eaters is the most lyrical of the three collections. Her prose and pacing are gorgeous and haunting. I found myself reading poems over and over for the pleasure of the sounds and sensations. It’s the shortest of the three books, but feels ample. Often, I felt springboarded by unexpected juxtapositions into sensations I had never tried to name but knew within myself. If I described one feeling that this book left me with, it’s a sense of longing for things I have just tasted or known or hoped for and no longer can access. It’s being on the edge or other side of friendships, lovers, ideas, but just barely, looking back knowing it is near but fading away. She writes intimately about love and its physical experience and about being a woman and mother and the beauties and dangers of both.
In “The first refuses to sing, so sings,” she writes, “I knew by scent your body’s / sly marauding. Peeled fruit wetting the palm, / mineral taste on the tongue. I was young, / impetuous. I touched it twice / and twice it bit to keep me nestled close.” This fragment, like many throughout the book, is sensory and specific, a little bit ominous and also sexy—all these sensations made more themselves by the resonant sounds within—palm, tongue, young—made by a mouth closing around something. Eliza is a friend of friends who works as a nurse in a hospital, which helps me understand how effectively she travels between the linguistic and the visceral, the head and the heart and the hands.
Before I learned that Caroline Boutard—who I know as Carol—was a poet, I knew her as one part of a couple who together are among the most inspiring and visionary farmers in our region. She and her husband, Anthony, own and operate Ayers Creek Farm (I wrote about them years ago for the Lucky Peach website and just this week released a miso gift pack made with their beans and barley). The Boutards were avid gardeners and naturalists before they came to commercial farming later in life. Most of her collection Each Leaf Singing takes place on their farm, often with Anthony, and often, I find, in a moment when death or decay presents itself. In “Wild,” she writes of coyotes, “Only once, a tiny bitch was sick enough / to limp down out driveway / and drag herself beneath the truck. / Panting, she stared into my eyes / until the bullet hit her skull. // Our neighbor asked to hang the corpse / on his fence, / the man who holds a collar / or a pistol behind his back / for all outsiders. // We planted her little body among the plum, / tucked her head in her paws / and curled her up / to sleep under the loam.”
This book is a collection of specific moments when Boutard is faced with intense sensory experiences—dying animals, flying birds, pounding rain, dirt-encrusted hands, smelly cheese, physical cues to the fragility and mortality of those she loves. Her writing is the most direct and formal of the three—stripped of fancifulness. The moments she gathers are clear and comprehensible, but add up to something that feels enormous—the weight of older age, of overcoming despair, of facing death and attempting to make peace, of lingering on beauty and joy, in spite of everything. I have long admired Boutard as a human, and it feels so amazing to have some of her inner worlds captured here for me to hold and know as I grow older.
This small sharing is my invitation for you to give books by local writers to friends, possibly challenging them to dive into new waters. I feel very attached to these three poetry collection and the feelings they conjured in me. I am left both more raw and more experienced than when I began.