Lighted Distances: Four Seasons on Goodlow Rim
by John Daniel
Broadstone Books
2023 | 130 pages
For his fifth book of poems, Lighted Distances: Four Seasons on Goodlow Rim, John Daniel takes us back to south central Oregon, a special place for Daniel in his origin story as a writer, having come to Oregon in the late 60s, then returning in the 80s after a few years at Stanford. It’s a book of four sections, organized by season, and the poems are a meditative, flowing haiku-variant with interspersed sections of prose, or free verse, focusing on natural history.
This is a book that juggles the specific with the universal, the internal and the external, the concrete and the mystical. The past and the present. It’s certainly a poetry of place, but it’s also a query exploring meaning and our belonging in the world: the author’s, yes, but also people, humans, us, all amid a world suffering from the abuse of the industrial era.
Daniel’s choice of a haiku style allows beauty via its brevity, each a short, concise stanza that Daniel uses to convey one idea or image. The Daniel haiku is staggered, perhaps in homage to the stepped descent from the rim to the valley, and though they’re rhythmic, they aren’t strictly syllabic. Packing elegance with sound and rhythm, he writes:
Amber yarrow stalks
stand swaybacked, on each seedhead
a dollop of snow.
And:
My view for miles
hayfields, pasture, sparse homes, barns,
Bryant Mountain beyond.
The music of the haiku derives from Daniel’s careful rhythms. “My view for miles” is a reassuring iambic line, but the second line slows us. A dactyl, a trochee, a spondee, a full pause on “barns,” and then the pace picks up in the third line. We flow out to the distance of the mountain in an easy rhythm mirroring the first line’s rhythm. It’s the best kind of tour: lyrical and lovely.
And Daniel’s control of sound is apparent. Assonance benefits a line — the swaybacked amber stalks, for instance — but then “a dollop of snow” contrasts, finalizing the verse, pausing it like good punctuation, the lilt of the l’s and o’s easing us out of the more nasal a’s. It’s a careful mapping, vowel by vowel, step by step over Goodlow Rim.
And so we get a tour of the landscape across seasons, but we also meet John Daniel as he examines himself, his life, our lives from the senior perspective of an elder asking important questions about our existence.
I think the mind at night
seeks beyond thought the wholeness
from which it came.
And:
Come spring I’ll be 72,
my father’s age
when cancer killed him.
These are both backward and forward focused queries, meditations on being amid the beauty of the natural world. It’s clear Daniel values the poignancy of a specific moment, whether a deer drinking from a pond or a coyote crossing snow. But amid his Zen-like focus, he is asking not just for a mindful awareness, but wondering if we’re doing enough to sustain the world around us. There is pessimism here—not bitterness, but a sense of disappointment—and why shouldn’t there be?
We sense the beauty
of Being. But we can’t seem
to live that beauty.
The italics are his. He’s mourning humanity’s approach to the world. As in this haiku: “The house sheltered us / from wild beasts, / but not from our own kind.”
In addition, what provides perspective are the sections of free verse, reading like prose, that add a historical context in direct contrast to the musings of the imagistic haikus. They read more like a John McPhee essay, starting with the Big Bang, considering how flimsy the odds an enormous event like that could have produced life.
So the first generation of stars was born. There was
light in the cosmos, seen nowhere by no one.
And later:
Probably in seafloor thermal vents, when Earth was
still quite young, organic molecules somehow
organized and learned the trick of replication. No
poet, priest, philosopher, or scientist can tell us
how this came about.
There is an accumulative effect to the book, but it’s still a volume to pick up, flip open, and read at random. Daniel’s use of the haiku form allows that. But to only consider a stanza here or there, while rewarding, is not quite what’s intended. These poems juggle joy and melancholy, and they do it within the context of a man considering his mortality, and then again in the context of the creation of life on earth, of the universe, and the fragility of delicate life.
Daniel does find his connection to the natural world. Behind and ahead of him. He opens, in an early stanza in the first section, Fall, looking for what “might lead me / to me” but he’s really addressing what links himself and each of us to the deep natural history of the rich, beautiful world. Even amid our individual insignificance.
I know little,
but I know I am kin
to all I can and cannot see.
This feels like the heart of the book, the place we arrive at on the final pages, where Goodlow Rim will continue to erode, and human and animal alike will return to the organic dust from which they came, and all growth, even the slimmest of juniper limbs, can break apart the very rock in which they may root. Life continues on its turbulent way, always growing, always dying. And Daniel finds his way “the way a poem does / small wakenings one by one.”
Read poems by John Daniel appearing in Terrain.org: eight poems from Lighted Distances and two Mount St. Helens poems.
Andrew C. Gottlieb is the author of the poetry collection Tales of a Distance (Trail to Table Books, 2022). His writing has appeared in journals like Best New Poets, Ecotone, The Fly Fish Journal, and the Mississippi Review. He has been writer-in-residence at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in addition to a number of wilderness locations, including three national parks: Denali, Everglades, and Isle Royale. He’s an editorial board member of Terrain.org.
Read three poems by Andrew C. Gottlieb and his Letter to America, “The Question We’ll Ask,” appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Josemaria Toscano, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Andrew C. Gottlieb by Lisa Hu Chen.
