Reaching Forever. Philip C. Kolin

      Reaching Forever

      Poems

      Poiema Poetry Series 30

      Copyright © 2019 Philip C. Kolin. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Cascade Books

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-5993-5

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-5994-2

      ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-5995-9

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Names: Kolin, Philip C., author. | Mariani, Paul, foreword.

      Title: Reaching forever : poems / by Philip C. Kolin, foreword by Paul Mariani.

      Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019 | Poiema Poetry Series 30

      Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-5993-5 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-5994-2 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-5995-9 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Poetry—21st century

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. 01/28/19

      Foreword

      Paul Mariani

      Begin with water. Begin with Genesis and the flood. Begin with the Creator of it all, that incredibly generous and consummate artist. It is we creatures who—the poet reminds us—must be baptized, submerged, into the mystery if we are ever going to begin to adequately respond to that creation with its vast waters defined by those “coral and turquoise,/reefs bejeweled with fins and fans.” It is we who will have to be “pooled into fonts,/wells, and tides” if we are ever to “acquire a majesty” which was never of our making. Be still, reader, and immerse yourself in the infinite symphony of the universe, and trust in this poet to guide us.

      Philip Kolin has worn many hats over a long and illustrious career. He’s a scholar-professor steeped in literature and religion, a teacher, an editor, and a searcher. But above all he’s a poet. And not just any kind of poet, but a prophetic poet, a viable witness to the world in all its rainbow colors as well as the spectrum of black, a man who has spent the better part of his life listening for God’s Word. He can read creeks and ponds and rivers and seas, but especially the Great Mississippi the way William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor and the Eliot of Dry Salvages have read the river.

      For me, one of the strongest poems in this intense and brilliant collection is “The River Burial,” where “the old Mississippi travels/ across the seas down to the Jordan,” for this is after all the old Bible belt. “The preacher smothers and submerges each sinner,” he shows us, having witnessed such river baptisms often enough, for “air is vanity going under the dark river” and it is God who will “rinse wrath and lust out of each of the convicted.” And yet, the poet knows all too well that the sins of us mortals don’t ever seem to disappear completely. For the truth is that they seem to “keep coming back to shore” as the river “returns the remains of the dead each night.”

      Consider the fourteen-year-old African-American, Emmett Till from Chicago (like the poet himself) visiting family down south, for instance, only to be savagely beaten and murdered by two whites because he allegedly wolf-whistled a white woman, his broken body weighted down in the Tallahatchie River in the Mississippi Delta. Kolin has written extensively about Till, still haunted by the boy, who keeps appearing again ghost-like, plaintively, in these poems.

      Water, life-giving water: it’s everywhere in these poems. Including the Gulf, where a blind man feels the sun on his back, and a veteran strides the beach, apparently oblivious to the world in front of him, where two widows console each other, and where

      A teen just out of rehab rushes

      to the beach, his guitar slung across

      his tattooed chest and pockmarked arms

      to serenade the waves that do not listen.

      Or again, there’s that Pentecostal morning on the beach, a glimpse of heaven, where we have a hint of what it means that the last shall be first, and the first last:

      Jamaicans free for the day

      from stocking shelves at Wal Mart,

      their black bodies glistening

      in the whitecaps; Vietnamese

      grandfathers maneuvering toddlers

      through the foamy surf,

      three Serbian boys diving

      headlong into the waves.

      And the drawl of speakers

      from countless Southern towns

      called to the beach.

      Each heard what the waves were saying.

      “Then too there are those seven brown pelicans” flying off into the distance of the Gulf, the last rays of the setting sun catching them as they break “free of the land now, “ while the hungry cries of the quotidian gulls go on “pecking the sloshing tides.” Watch carefully, the poet tells us, for isn’t this after all

      a picture

      of what awaits those who will travel

      between twilight and dark

      to enter light that is never framed.

      And so with the seasons, evolving over millennia along with the formation of our present world, from lava rock to the first seeds of the kingdom of grass, for God saw that it was good. And then there are the gulls and the pelicans and the dogs and the rest of it in Kolin’s Adamic re-enactment. Ah, “How glorious if the earth coursed/ through lush pampas year round,” he reminds us. But the earth “must compass the dark seasons, too,” “the prickly dismantling of fall, / the white comforter of winter/ above a crypt of cold stark seeds.”

      But, always, there’s the great return. Fresh water again with that much-needed rain, all of it stitched together in the poem’s closing rhymed couplets, as we celebrate

      spring’s tears for their return

      and the bravo of April’s resurrection,

      green shafts with a crown of soft rain,

      the kingdom of grass come again.

      Oh, there’s darkness here, enough to satisfy even a Cormac McCarthy, one sees. As in “The Black Blizzard,” where the poet evokes those terrible dust storms of the Thirties, when dust begat dust and the soil

      we lived on and were buried in

      whipped up and [was] swept away by winds

      from a sky that seemed to harbor

      its own revenge

      And where families moved west, out of an Eden they had helped to destroy, to settle in places like Los Alamos, place of the poplars, where “We thought we could harvest the sky once more,” and where in another short decade new clouds, far more ominous still, “billowed like white mushrooms, /ready for the picking.”

      Such a plethora of riches in these poems—many of them dark meditations which grow ever darker as we stare into the face of unremitting evil, as in “Sons of Moloch,” part of the aptly-named “Wolves” section,