REVIEWS : : Lichen Songs
4 COLLECTIONS FROM OREGON POETS THAT EXAMINE NATURE, LOVE, LOSS, AND MORE
By Stephanie Adams-Santos | For The Oregonian/OregonLive
March 26, 2019
https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2019/03/4-collections-from-oregon-poets-that-examine-nature-love-loss-and-more.html
George Venn: “Lichen Songs: New and Selected Poems” (Kelsay Books, 128 pages, $17).
Venn’s new and selected work — grounded in Oregon’s natural landscapes, rural life, family — holds at its core that mysterious covenant of life: the mortal pact we make with the natural world, and the ones we love. It’s the “lichen song” that holds the world of these poems together, the natural substrate that lies beneath and beyond all else. The doe that revisits the yard. The trees we will one day become. It’s against this backdrop that family history may lift beyond the private, personal memories of the poet and into universal territory. The poems are at their best when they lean into the substrate, into the mystery, into that good Venn groove where the particular lends itself to the universal. It’s in these small moments that stunning truths and lasting images can emerge, with sometimes shocking beauty: ”the next blind lightning /that burns beyond this line.”
By Stephanie Adams-Santos | For The Oregonian/OregonLive
March 26, 2019
https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2019/03/4-collections-from-oregon-poets-that-examine-nature-love-loss-and-more.html
George Venn: “Lichen Songs: New and Selected Poems” (Kelsay Books, 128 pages, $17).
Venn’s new and selected work — grounded in Oregon’s natural landscapes, rural life, family — holds at its core that mysterious covenant of life: the mortal pact we make with the natural world, and the ones we love. It’s the “lichen song” that holds the world of these poems together, the natural substrate that lies beneath and beyond all else. The doe that revisits the yard. The trees we will one day become. It’s against this backdrop that family history may lift beyond the private, personal memories of the poet and into universal territory. The poems are at their best when they lean into the substrate, into the mystery, into that good Venn groove where the particular lends itself to the universal. It’s in these small moments that stunning truths and lasting images can emerge, with sometimes shocking beauty: ”the next blind lightning /that burns beyond this line.”
Lichen Songs: New and Selected Poems (Kelsay Books 2017)
Amazon review by Donald Wolff (11/20/17)
George Venn has made innumerable contributions to Oregon literary history, confirmed by a quick glance at the acknowledgment pages of Lichen Songs: New and Selected Poems. You can discover there what must count as a timeless contribution: Two poems, “High Cascades” and “The Lichen Family Story” are literally etched into basalt and can be read at the entrance to the Cascade Crest Pavilion of the New Oregon Zoo in Portland. Quintessentially regional and perpetual—reason enough to buy the book. But buy it for the enduring comfort only well-wrought words can bring. And to remind yourself that words can still attend to truth to be etched in memory and stone.
Lichen Songs: New and Selected Poems has been for nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The collection stretches from 1978 to the present. Thirty years of poems selected from three previous collections, including Marking the Magic Circle, which appeared in 1987. It won the Oregon Book Award and was also selected for inclusion in “Literary Oregon: 100 Books, 1800-2000,” published by OCHC/Oregon State Library. There are two final sections, one that presents published but uncollected poems—poems from journals and not later appearing in books—and a final section of new and unpublished poems—with the latter, yours will be an original unfettered encounter. The penultimate section includes the widely reprinted “Teacher in the Desert,” which ends
Amazon review by Donald Wolff (11/20/17)
George Venn has made innumerable contributions to Oregon literary history, confirmed by a quick glance at the acknowledgment pages of Lichen Songs: New and Selected Poems. You can discover there what must count as a timeless contribution: Two poems, “High Cascades” and “The Lichen Family Story” are literally etched into basalt and can be read at the entrance to the Cascade Crest Pavilion of the New Oregon Zoo in Portland. Quintessentially regional and perpetual—reason enough to buy the book. But buy it for the enduring comfort only well-wrought words can bring. And to remind yourself that words can still attend to truth to be etched in memory and stone.
Lichen Songs: New and Selected Poems has been for nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The collection stretches from 1978 to the present. Thirty years of poems selected from three previous collections, including Marking the Magic Circle, which appeared in 1987. It won the Oregon Book Award and was also selected for inclusion in “Literary Oregon: 100 Books, 1800-2000,” published by OCHC/Oregon State Library. There are two final sections, one that presents published but uncollected poems—poems from journals and not later appearing in books—and a final section of new and unpublished poems—with the latter, yours will be an original unfettered encounter. The penultimate section includes the widely reprinted “Teacher in the Desert,” which ends
|
So, today, once more,
take the longer view. Pour out your life as water on dry ground then, when you think you’re empty pour out your life again. |
I envy George Venn’s new readers—the shock the real, of the familiar, of the familiar becoming new, and of the legendary—of the love song of Fungi and Algae, of Coyote teaching Jesus a new word, of Mr. Is and his brother Mr. Real Smart brought down by the singing of Wonders and Doubts in the street.
However, if you are a seasoned reader, then you know that re-reading a fine poem from your past is to see it anew. You and the poem have grown together in your separate places. Therefore a volume of new and selected poems doubles the pleasure of the text for those familiar with an author.
Avid Northwest readers like myself, who have been treasuring Venn’s work for a quarter century or more, find solace and hope-of-truth in his poetry and prose. Returning to it, we find a deepening in the older work and in the new we find the same raw borderland courage—the courage of continued faith in the word-world. We see his truthtelling power in a widening gyre of meaning that spills out over Venn’s personal inland empire, as eastern Oregon and Washington, along with Idaho, are known. There is plenty of tenderness, but also plenty of hardscrabble truth, as in the final poem of the collection, “Deal Canyon After the 2017 Blizzard”:
However, if you are a seasoned reader, then you know that re-reading a fine poem from your past is to see it anew. You and the poem have grown together in your separate places. Therefore a volume of new and selected poems doubles the pleasure of the text for those familiar with an author.
Avid Northwest readers like myself, who have been treasuring Venn’s work for a quarter century or more, find solace and hope-of-truth in his poetry and prose. Returning to it, we find a deepening in the older work and in the new we find the same raw borderland courage—the courage of continued faith in the word-world. We see his truthtelling power in a widening gyre of meaning that spills out over Venn’s personal inland empire, as eastern Oregon and Washington, along with Idaho, are known. There is plenty of tenderness, but also plenty of hardscrabble truth, as in the final poem of the collection, “Deal Canyon After the 2017 Blizzard”:
|
When nothing moves under tons of
white indifference, wild Christmas birds lure you out to admire their black eyes. There a chatter of high starlings wheel, turn, then descend the frozen blue, settle their jazz in the naked birch next door. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There low over the gable, dark winter hawk hunts, English sparrow in one talon-- lunch on the fly when God looks away. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There those gray Asian doves. Their sudden flights invade the bright hungry afternoon calling more love, more love, more love-- |
Venn animates our landscape—not “our” as in owning it, but “our” as in being of it—he animates our landscape with new legends saddling up to the ancient, with nearly unfathomable family dramas populating our farms and mountains, with the primordial rhetoric of bees and stone. His work over the years is a great invitation and a continuous joy.
—Donald Wolff, author of Soon Enough (2007)
George Venn once wrote “poetry waits...for a voice from fire, water, wing, willow, wind.” All those elements infuse this collection of new and previously published poems from an authentic voice of the Pacific Northwest.
Inspired by insightful observations of nature, teaching, the hopes and disappointments of life—his and others'–Venn's work offers a realism rooted in his concrete experiences as a bee keeper, house builder, apple grower, musician, and teacher. Here are the eastern Oregon tomatoes picked green before the first frost, the deer in the bird feeder, the teacher pouring out life on dry ground, the happy and cruel memories of youth, the traveler who never planned to stay but is still here.
Venn retired from teaching English and writing at Eastern Oregon University in 2002 and still lives in La Grande. “This Could Be Our Story,” included here, wryly describes making the most of isolated, small college life; and a major lesson of his work is to confront life honestly and learn its lessons. His published poetry collections, original analysis of C.E.S. Wood's version of Chief Joseph's surrender speech, and edited six volume Oregon Literature Series, a major contribution to our cultural history, have earned many awards. Along the way he brought literary giants to La Grande audiences, fought the good fight to preserve the region's natural beauty, and generously shared his knowledge of teaching and writing throughout Oregon.
The title poem describes fungi and algae doing “the hardest job in the world—eating rocks, making dirt,” giving earth the gift of varied life. Yet death lurks. Every driver “Crossing the Blues in March” in a whiteout knows “You could die, here, tonight.” The grandfather who always slaughtered with a sharp knife so 'nothing should suffer' ends up in years of misery because the God he served is a “shoddy butcher.”
The dominant theme, however, is appreciation of the joys of life and readiness for what it will bring where “eternity is now—mysterious and whole,” where “an unchurched doe” seen out the window could be “enough resurrection” for an Easter Sunday. The collection's last line describes birds emerging from a La Grande blizzard, the doves “calling more love, more love, more love.”
Lichen Songs' readers will find more love here. Rooted in the experience of a thoughtful observer, it brings wisdom and beauty out of the local and specific, sharing what a good man has learned from real life.
Inspired by insightful observations of nature, teaching, the hopes and disappointments of life—his and others'–Venn's work offers a realism rooted in his concrete experiences as a bee keeper, house builder, apple grower, musician, and teacher. Here are the eastern Oregon tomatoes picked green before the first frost, the deer in the bird feeder, the teacher pouring out life on dry ground, the happy and cruel memories of youth, the traveler who never planned to stay but is still here.
Venn retired from teaching English and writing at Eastern Oregon University in 2002 and still lives in La Grande. “This Could Be Our Story,” included here, wryly describes making the most of isolated, small college life; and a major lesson of his work is to confront life honestly and learn its lessons. His published poetry collections, original analysis of C.E.S. Wood's version of Chief Joseph's surrender speech, and edited six volume Oregon Literature Series, a major contribution to our cultural history, have earned many awards. Along the way he brought literary giants to La Grande audiences, fought the good fight to preserve the region's natural beauty, and generously shared his knowledge of teaching and writing throughout Oregon.
The title poem describes fungi and algae doing “the hardest job in the world—eating rocks, making dirt,” giving earth the gift of varied life. Yet death lurks. Every driver “Crossing the Blues in March” in a whiteout knows “You could die, here, tonight.” The grandfather who always slaughtered with a sharp knife so 'nothing should suffer' ends up in years of misery because the God he served is a “shoddy butcher.”
The dominant theme, however, is appreciation of the joys of life and readiness for what it will bring where “eternity is now—mysterious and whole,” where “an unchurched doe” seen out the window could be “enough resurrection” for an Easter Sunday. The collection's last line describes birds emerging from a La Grande blizzard, the doves “calling more love, more love, more love.”
Lichen Songs' readers will find more love here. Rooted in the experience of a thoughtful observer, it brings wisdom and beauty out of the local and specific, sharing what a good man has learned from real life.
—Charles Coate, Portland, Oregon, 10/6/17
In this wondrous book, a winter storytelling-poem—a love poem—carries forty years of writing. The poem’s title transforms itself into the book’s title, and each of the book’s five sections has one of the poem’s stanzas as its epigraph. This guiding poem comes whole in the last section, in the present, "New and Previously Unpublished Poems," where it asks
Can you see this pair? Their furious old
feast? Your life a Lichen lover’s gift?
Here in the UK, with my feet in Oregon, I read George Venn in good company with his poet companions in the American West. Theodore Roethke, William Stafford, Richard Hugo, Vi Gale, Gary Snyder, others, a strong circle of friends and protégès, insiders and outsiders. Venn’s voice transcends the region of Eastern Oregon that feeds him its rocks and seasons, its people, its stories, which he sends echoing in finely named details into farther places. He finishes on a birdcall after a blizzard, not needing to make overt claims, but a call familiar everywhere in the world.
A wondrous book.
Can you see this pair? Their furious old
feast? Your life a Lichen lover’s gift?
Here in the UK, with my feet in Oregon, I read George Venn in good company with his poet companions in the American West. Theodore Roethke, William Stafford, Richard Hugo, Vi Gale, Gary Snyder, others, a strong circle of friends and protégès, insiders and outsiders. Venn’s voice transcends the region of Eastern Oregon that feeds him its rocks and seasons, its people, its stories, which he sends echoing in finely named details into farther places. He finishes on a birdcall after a blizzard, not needing to make overt claims, but a call familiar everywhere in the world.
A wondrous book.
—Wayne Hill, UK, former Associate Editor, Performance Research
“A beautiful part of the country, the Northwest is home to many poets. A few of them—William Stafford, Gary Snyder, David Wagoner—have written memorable poems about it. But hardly any can be said to have Oregon coursing through their veins. This is what the delighted reader will find in George Venn’s Lichen Songs: vivid poems of the region, and far beyond. A long-awaited and highly recommended collection.”
—John Witte, Editor (emeritus), Northwest Review, Eugene, OR