A Masterful Collection about the Religious Significance of the Mystical Commonplace
Written: Sep 11 '07
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Pros: Masterful voice; powerful, universal themes; deftly revels in the mystical and symbolic commonplace.
Cons: B/W photo cover with dark green title starkly contrasts the lively and masterful poetry inside.
The Bottom Line: If you like reading W.S. Merwin, William Stafford, W.D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, and other modern and contemporary poets, you'll like reading Roger Kirschbaum's Hunter Ranch.
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| swopedesign's Full Review: Hunter Ranch |
(Originally published in I-70 Review)
There are few poets who genuinely engage me as a reader, among them Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin, Philip Levine, William Stafford, W. D. Snodgrass, John Gilgun and now Roger Kirschbaum, to name a few. Though I know Roger and his work from the informal poets' circle at Missouri Western State College (now Missouri Western State University) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and enjoy his first chapbook from that era very much, Hunter Ranch is like discovering a new poet. He has matured and fine-tuned his poetic voice and vision into a perfect symphony of sight, sound, color, place, and meaning. Roger revels in the mystical commonplace, writing surgically precise but simple details of every day objects, activities and experiences, and gives them meaning through simple, commonplace language. Like the best of poets, Roger plays no tricks on his readers. Divided into four seasons – Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter – Hunter Ranch takes readers to the heart of the Midwest where nature, love, loss, family and an honest day's work are examined and praised with quiet, religious fervor.
Hunter Ranch, the place, was once a thriving cattle operation in Doniphan County, Kansas. Roger took refuge there in 1996 after the death of his first wife, Julie, and wrote the cycle of poems that would become Hunter Ranch, the book, four years later. Julie was an inexhaustible source of inspiration in Roger's life and work before her death as I recall, and continues to inspire him and his work in the poems of Hunter Ranch. Julie appears in name or character in less than half the poems, but her spirit and legacy are the bedrock for the other poems. That Roger does not dwell on what must surely be his unbearable grief for her, as other lesser poets might, is a testament and measure of Roger's professionalism. Roger (inadvertently perhaps) sums up Hunter Ranch himself in the poem "In Wolf River Valley" from the collection:
How eager I am to enter
the closely guarded rooms
where love is not itself until lost
until it becomes memory, becomes art.
The cover of Hunter Ranch, like the covers of most small press poetry books, appears uninspired and, in the case of this book in particular, antithetic to its contents, the poems both a colorful, moving and meticulously detailed study of Roger's past and a lasting monument to it. The cover is dark and foreboding, composed of a black-and-white photograph of Roger beside an old barn on a gray overcast day, presumably at Hunter Ranch, with the title set in Times in dark forest green and the blurb set in Helvetica in black, Times and Helvetica being arguably the two most common typefaces of the last century. The quality of the photo itself, slightly blurry and out of focus, resembling a tintype from the early days of photography, likewise contrasts the powerful imagery and rich colorful specific details of Roger's poetry.
The whole effect contradicts the carefully wrought work inside, but on closer consideration, one discovers that the cover, like the book's contents, works in multiple contradictory but complementary dramatic dimensions that are difficult to express in any medium but Roger's poems. On one level Hunter Ranch is Roger's means to exorcise his grief for the death of his wife and the unscripted chaos that her death brings. At the same time, readers witness and share this intensely personal experience with Roger, but for readers this experience both ends and repeats with every reading of Hunter Ranch. Readers now, like Roger, are haunted (bittersweetly) by it, at least for a time. That the typical seasonal cycle is skewed by one season in Hunter Ranch, ending with Winter, the season of death, instead of Spring, the season of rebirth, only serves to underscore the dramatic tensions at work in Hunter Ranch.
The best poetry demonstrates the highest art of linguistic compression, words considered and chosen so carefully that to change one of them is to destroy an entire dimension of symbolism and meaning within a poem. This art, unfortunately, seems lost in much of the poetry printed by the small press today; many of the poems which strive for compression do so so zealously they become internally disjointed with impossible imaginative leaps that make the poems uninteresting, difficult, and in the end inaccessible for most readers. Hunter Ranch, on the other hand, strikes a nearly perfect balance between compression and accessibility to communicate a mystical labyrinth of ideas, concepts and relationships that cannot be conscionably extricated, separated and dissected without destroying the poems. What remains after such study is dull, lifeless, sterile, silent. As T. S. Eliot might say, the poetry of Hunter Ranch communicates experiences impossible to communicate by any other means.
Written in the simple, unassuming everyday language of northeast Kansas and northwest Missouri, the poems of Hunter Ranch effortlessly meld work, nature and ritual, in seasonal context, into new meaning and new understanding, with unmistakably mystical and religious (and at times perhaps sacrilegious) overtones. This is no small task! In fact, Roger's Hunter Ranch is the only book I know which accomplishes this compression so consistently, so thoroughly, and so precisely as to make these elements inseparable for satisfactory discussion. Readers cannot examine one element without examining another, without destroying the poetry. Yet the poetry, despite this compression, remains perfectly accessible.
In Hunter Ranch, we find Roger and his family living, working and loving in typical small midwestern communities. As has been mentioned, Roger's wife, Julie, plays the largest role in this cycle of poems, but we also find Roger's son, Jhett, in several poems. Even after multiple readings, I understood these poems included Roger's circle of friends that I knew from my days at Missouri Western, i.e. Scott, Tony, Hans, John, Jeff, Dooley and others. Yet Roger never names them. Instead, Roger masterfully employs the first person plural "we" throughout the book, coaxing readers into familiarity, into the poems. As readers we become characters, become witnesses, and if readers (like myself) are familiar with small midwestern communities like those described by Roger, we cannot help but populate the poems of Hunter Ranch with the familiar types of characters we ourselves have known in these communities. This technique, for such readers, makes Hunter Ranch all the more personal and fulfilling.
As one might expect from a poet whose material is the Midwest, Roger's poems are also furnished with common objects characteristic of the Midwestern working class. This has long been one of my favorite features of Roger's poetry, powerful and effective even in his chapbook from the late 1980s. Throughout Hunter Ranch we find carefully placed bottle caps, brand names (Pepsi-Cola and Ford, for example), maps, rusted lanterns, storm windows, picket fences, axle grease, pickup trucks, farm implements, silos, cisterns, styrene, potbellied stoves, barns, honey bees, walking sticks, and other such things with a simple Midwestern flavor. In Hunter Ranch, these specific details are all the more powerful because they appear in unexpected juxtaposition among a network of grander ideas and themes. Such lively juxtapositions surprise, exercise and stretch the reader's mind.
The most powerful aspect of Hunter Ranch, however, is Roger's masterful ability to infuse the simple language, ordinary objects and unassuming characters of the Midwest with greater religious and spiritual significance. In the poems, Roger discusses work, marriage, teaching, history, farming, community, faith, love and other lasting universal themes. This short list reveals the depth and breadth of Roger's subject matter, and touches upon the rich mystic and religious possibilities that lie therein. Roger does not disappoint. Under Roger's tutelage readers discover the primeval healing and forgiveness of hands; the contradictory essence of language at once both limiting and limitless; euphoric altered experiences induced by youth, wine, honey, twilight, pain, and longing; baptism by rain, tears, sweat, rivers, lakes, snow, light, love, drowning, and loneliness; sermons on the nature of the soul, heaven, loss, guilt and love; tabernacles of fields of corn, beans and sorghum; and faith in weaving, weeding, planting, harvesting, fence building and other honest, rural labors. This list is by no means definitive. In Hunter Ranch, the most ordinary routines assume a rich spiritual and religious significance.
Roger Kirschbaum's Hunter Ranch is one of the most powerful books of poetry I've experienced in a long, long time. Some readers, no doubt, are quick to define or dismiss this book by date and region, by time and place, but we must not confuse any of these with simplicity, with being less important, less engaging, less accomplished, less accessible or less rewarding. Roger has skillfully and bravely wrestled with universal themes among the minutiae of the Midwest to publish a moving, timeless and masterful collection of poems. Roger's poetry is not simple. Every syllable, every word, every line, every poem in Hunter Ranch...not one word is wasted. For many poets, the powerful work collected in Hunter Ranch would be a pinnacle, a crowning achievement, their old man and the sea. Roger, however, is a young man, and his final master work, we hope, has yet to be written.
Format: Paperback, 5.5" x 8.5", 61 Pages
Date of Publication: 2000
Price: $7.00 Postage
ISBN: 0-939391-29-5
Bob Woodley Memorial Press
Washburn University
Topeka, KS 66621
(785) 670-1445
e-mail paul.fecteau@washburn.edu
http://www.washburn.edu/reference/woodley-press/Reviews/hunter_ranch.htm
Recommended:
Yes
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swopedesign
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Member: Mike Swope
Location: Wichita, KS
Reviews written: 36
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Graphic/web designer. Grew brother's retail tire business. Now managing a similar long-established business.
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