Trail to Table Press / Wandering Aengus Press | 2022 | 65 pages
In a poem set in a Denali winter, a place where “a lichen may thrive for a thousand years,” poet Andrew Gottlieb asserts that “time is not light but layers.” We watch him excavate those layers in Tales of a Distance, a stunning collection of place-based poems filled with memory and meaning—powerful poems that are complex and nuanced.
Gottlieb grapples with mortality, from the grief of watching a parent grow frail and die to the cruelty of the natural world, where predator-prey relationships are necessary, where rabbits get killed by red-tailed hawks. A son explores the complexity of his parents’ marriage, a relationship in which a man laughed at his wife’s panic and “his raised voice grated slivers of her.” We witness, too, the complexity of the father/son relationship as the son watches his father’s range become circumscribed from illness, as his father becomes “a seething bedridden man.”
The poet takes us inside kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms. These are intimate poems filled with evocative detail: the squeak of the back porch screen door, the sizzle of fish cooking in butter, cold oatmeal left in a bowl, and the smell of green-eyed potatoes frying in black smoke and grease. Gottlieb invites us into domestic spaces but shares, too, details of the landscape: the hummock-strung howl of the coyote, the crows in the old black oak, the trilling of a frog, and the scuffle of leaves under bare feet. In moments alone, outdoors—fishing, paddling, walking in the moonlight—we witness an intimacy with the landscape, a relationship based on years of careful observation and quiet interactions:
Deep in the old growth, there’s a presence,
a recent breath, the deepest scent on rocks
left traced by the navigation of mosses.
We get some wonderfully lyrical poems about fishing, a sport in which “these baits are frail hope that one dark mouth will take the hook.” The writer who craves the quiet of early morning recalls his father’s fishing stories. We see the fishing line move from “dry hand to water mouth” and the poem moves quickly to memories of the adult son feeding his father:
Of course, he never wanted to be fed,
and you never wanted to feed him,
and you both sat there knowing it,
but you had to agree
to a closeness you’d never been taught.
Fishing, too, touches the inner wild of a man: “To bed down in wild grass, to sleep with a river. / To try to name the question that memory / always is.” In one stunning poem, intimacy with a river becomes metaphor for the husband/wife relationship, as the husband sees his wife’s menstrual blood as “alluvial shift in a body I know.”
Always, the poems include careful and accurate details of nature. This is a writer who reveres the trees (alder, aspen, willow) and creatures (moose, hawk, brown trout) by naming them, whose familiarity with the landscape is paired with his sensitivity to the intricacies of relationships and the unravelling of memory.
The poem “Tourist Canoe” captures the physicality of paddling a canoe with this elegant description:
Angled wood turns pond drip to ripples,
and the curved bow spears the surface
in a silent glide ahead of the pressed blade.
This is you alone, your body levering the boat,
hull rolling with tensed intention,
hips shifting with the lean and lull of the shell
on clear water,
Gottlieb is a poet who understands the value of imagination and of quiet meditative moments, who acknowledges the inadequacy of science to name the richness of the Everglades, who describes dreams as “the brain / storyboarding its way through the stigma / of night.” These are nature poems that question what we know about nature, listing our feeble childhood attempts to understand nature and predict nature: counting the seconds between lightning and thunder or using a thumb to predict sunset. We get glimpses of the wild set against the “pedestrian taunting of email replies.” We spend time with the river that “never forgives, never compromises / its mission.”
These are poems about the fragility of life and the tenacity of relationships, poems about the love and beauty that happens in quotidian moments, poems that aren’t afraid to confront dark night thoughts. A husband wonders what he will do if the wife who “makes it somewhat bearable” dies before he does. Two brothers, mourning the death of their father, drive across the American landscape, like vagrants, like coyotes, the details of that landscape adding a depth to their grieving.
Gottlieb explores liminal spaces, too: the water under the dock where the catfish lives, sandbars that “lazily wait for their next invisible shift,” the river’s edge, the spot between land and water where the fisherman can stand for hours; the edge between life and death where humans know they are dying, where a father falls from a wheelchair, where limbs are amputated, where the predator stalks their prey; the time between sunrise and daylight, between dusk and sunset; the blur of light where sky meets water, the gulf’s horizon; and dreams that linger after waking, souvenirs of “the magic places that clutch us in the night.”
The careful and lyrical details about nature and grief in Tales of a Distance complement the deeper philosophical questions that arise during long, dark nights. Here is a poet who has spent time listening to rain, observing the opossum’s yellow eye, watching for the arrival of a storm at “the hot edge of the swamp.” He doesn’t offer answers, but bears witness to cycles and patterns in nature and gives us careful observations in a gorgeous, sensitive collection. These are poems you will want to read aloud and savor, poems you will revisit on nights you can’t sleep.
Read three poems by Andrew C. Gottlieb published in Terrain.org.
Janine DeBaise is the author of two collections of poetry, Body Language and Of a Feather. Her essays have appeared in Orion Magazine, the Southwest Review, the Hopper, and numerous other journals. She teaches writing and literature at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. Her pedagogy and her writing reflect her interest in environmental and feminist issues.
Read Janine DeBaise’s Letter to America, as well as a poem, “Out of turn,” also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Dick Hoskins, courtesy Pexels.
