Pathfinder by Robert Love

Collection of Poetry, Essays and Tales by Montana Logger Robert Love
Purchase Pathfinder by Robert Love

“Pathfinder, Selected Poems, Essays and Tales” by Robert Love

Up On Big Rock Poetry Series, a Shipwreckt Books imprint, Winona, Minnesota, 2023

ISBN:978-1-7376685-9-6.

By James Ross Kelly

I go to Montana about every other year, and my wife goes every year, as her mother lives there—she’ll be flying out there this year. Last year we drove, and it is a long drive from Northern California. Robert Love came to Montana from Pennsylvania about the same time I went back to Oregon after the Army and college in the early 1970s. Back in Oregon for decades, everyone I knew that went to Montana did not come back. When I finally got to see it, I knew why–there’s a special something. Robert Love’s new book Pathfinder is part of that special something. He, like some of my friends, did not go back. This book is organized as half poetry, and then essays and tales.

Selected Poems 1973-2022

The poetry Love gives us is studied verse after 20th century American poets. The introduction by Ken McCullough makes a comparison with Gary Snyder, and this is not off the mark at all with a deep rich notion of the natural world that is not one of a day hiker in for quick walk up some of the Montana trails in August then slamming down a poem for the New Yorker. Robert has lived the life of Montana as a logger. Yet, this poetry is not unlike William Carlos Williams the MD from Patterson, New Jersey that turned modern poetry on its head and sent the century on and away from the stale rhymes of the past. But Love made a living as a timber faller among the confluence of many rivers and lakes out of Western Montana down to the Absaroka Mountains. The comparison to Williams the MD to a timber cutter might seem far-fetched unless you’ve been in the industry even a little bit. Timber fallers are resolute intelligent men who have to be as careful as surgeons, or they may be casualties—not losing a patient’s life but their own. Love’s rich panoply of Rocky Mountain material and capturing this: the there and back of it, from a life of cutting logs and hunting in Montana. These poems are as important as “The Red Wheelbarrow,” American literature has never really been mainly urban. One or two of these poems should be in the New Yorker.

Robert Love creates poems that may be as good as any now in American Literature. “Cinders,” while completely different than Williams, “Widows Lament in Springtime,” is just as powerful. Love’s poem, “Four Elk Dreams,” about elk hunting then dreaming about the elk turning into people that give voice, share empathy, and understanding about using them for food, ends as an other-worldly type of experience for a few moments with a cognizant idea that he should eat something else. “Reading Bukowski: Lunchbreak” has Love reading a well-worn book and other than the title he never gives the big guy a mention but turns it into an homage amidst a break with logging gear. “The Pine Martin on the Gut pile,” wisps you into a Montana scene, you read it, and know it happened, and it is simply not like anything else.

Essays and Tales

Since the 1970s there has been a rage over forests in the Pacific Northwest. Love has been embedded into this and reports back. Tree planters, loggers, Forest Service employees, have seen the result firsthand. Making a living in the middle of clearcut forests is a visual experience not unlike seeing a hellscape aftermath of war. It will grow back if left alone. The problem is it will not be a forest for one hundred to five hundred years. That educated men traded forests for money via schools of Forestry funded by timber barons is the way of the world. Robert Love, after cutting timber for Plum Creek for twenty years, left the big and much maligned company and has for some time now been advocating something else. There has always been a way of cutting timber that was friendly to ecology, the land, the animals, and the great beauty of this land. Love left Plum Creek and began logging small scale for private parties with a method of considering that landscape as it is–this is a friendly method. Love’s subsequent essays here pop with a scintillating prose that explains the dilemma. There are methods and reasoning to change tactics from the industrial forestry that eliminated forests in favor of tree farms— to advocate for kinder and gentler way of leaving larger trees and managing species as they are adapted for ever present forest fires. The first essay “Signatures on the Land,” begins with a quote from Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. So, if you know anything about the rage over forests you then know you are in good hands. Then you read:

It appears our forests in the Northern Rockies have been over logged, but in light of what fire ecologists are learning about pre-settlement forest densities and fire patterns, it’s more often true they’ve been poorly logged. While forest densities may have once been lower than they are today, average tree size was larger. The extensive forest and the prolific elk herds that our ancestors knew have been whittled into isolated remnants, and the genetic reservoir of mature, dominant individual is steadily evaporating.

We know that we have landed in the patch of a truth teller. It is the crux of the landscape of the entire Northwestern United States and Canada. Robert Love is telling us the truth with his essays. Timber management has generally been portrayed in no other manner than production and the bottom line. These are not essays of reminiscence of the good old days as a logger-—they are from a study of the land firsthand and the available literature to find out true science and a better way. “The Forests of Lookout Ridge,” bring us up close and personal into a forested watershed in the Rocky Mountains and see a complexity that is deep and abiding and quite unlike a plot of vegetables.

A poignant moving piece well into the book, “Grandfather’s Gun,” about a Thanksgiving deer hunt around Love’s property with his son who has come of age and is out with his father to harvest a deer with Love’s Grandfather’s gun. The simplicity and bare and accurate description of the humanity of his family, landscape, and wildlife are more than a workman like product. We know the territory from the poem “Cinders.” There is a completion here and we see why this was not, two slim volumes poems and essays—yet the connection stays random.

After completing the essays and a revealing “Journal of a Feral Shaman,” toward the end we see something that was revealed in the poetry, and our dilemma is we want more of the poetry, but not fewer essays.

The richness of dreaming of talking elk, burying a friend who had requested a grave on Love’s property and the heartfelt descriptive sanctity what that entailed, it all comes around that there’s a special something about Robert Love’s poetry and prose—this book will take you down into some Montana trails and truthful notions as if you were not a tourist.

Bob Love at Home in Columbia Springs, Montana
Bob Love at Home in Columbia Falls, Montana

Lost Lake Folk Opera V6 – Covid-19 2020 Special Issue

Lost Lake Folk Opera

Covid-19 2020 Special Issue

$12.99 – Purchase online

Writers reflect on Covid-19, the border closings, quarantines, lockdowns; George Floyd and the aftermath of peaceful protests hijacked by riotous smashers, looters, arsonists; U.S. Census work in Boston, Buddhist meditation in Bali, and so much more.

FEATURING

Emilio DeGrazia

Larry Gavin

Julie A. Ryan

Louis Martinelli

Emilio Regina

Jennifer Wang

Becky Boling

Steve McCown

Jim Johnson

Waliyullah Tunde Abimbola

A.S. Arcilesi

James Petrillo

Michael Crane

Janet Preus

Dan Butterfass

Neale Torgrimson

Wm. Anthony Connolly

Lee Henschel Jr.

Rob Hardy

Raymond Luczak

David Patt

Mercury-Marvin Sunderland

Roger McKnight

Imani Skipwith

D.E. Green

Justin Watkins

Kemuel DeMoville

Delta Eddy

Tom Driscoll

Dreaming with Open Eyes


Poems for Vincent Van Gogh

Louis Martinelli

$17.95 – Purchase online

Louis Martinelli’s grand performance in language guides us through the psyche of Van Gogh, surrounds his sorrow, illuminates his achievement, exalts in the ecstasy of painting he gave the world. I will savor these poems and for a long time to come.

Jason Berry, author most recently of City of A Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300

 

Lou Martinelli’s visionary collection of poems on Van Gogh, Dreaming with Open Eyes, is a marvel. While its sharp focus and consistent tone unify the volume, individual poems evoke an intriguing dialogue among a variety of voices. I am transported by their range, ingenuity, and fearlessness. The overall effect is breathtaking, culminating with a pair of exceptional poems.

Moreover, this edition incorporates a selection of Van Gogh’s own evocative drawings. In addition, it rewards the reader to look online for celebrated paintings named in many other poems—such as “Pieta,” “Sorrow,” and “Undergrowth with Two Figures.” Martinelli’s imaginative treatment of each piece strikes me as unerring. The sketch of Gachet, for instance, is especially soulful; indeed, his troubled expression seems to complement the discussion of Van Gogh’s psychology and distressed state of mind perfectly.

The author has also thoughtfully included an illustrated “Afterword.” A section entitled a “Note on Method” is especially illuminating, above all for an exchange with noted American ecologist and literary naturalist Paul Gruchow. Ultimately, the poet is bold in his assessment of the artist’s significance: “If Von Humboldt is our first ecological scientist, perhaps Van Gogh is our first ecological painter; everything he saw is connected to everything else.” Yet it is ultimately Van Gogh himself who utters the “last word”—as if a grace note closing the collection as a whole: “I have a wonderful lucidity at moments, these days when nature is so beautiful, I am not conscious of myself anymore and the painting comes to me as in a dream.”

Christian Knoeller, Purdue University, Author of Reimagining Environmental History

 

Ghosting

Steve McCown

Debut Collection

Ghosting

$17.95 – Purchase online

When Steve McCown finally gathered together the pages for this book he was probably a bit surprised to realize he had been a poet for the better part of his life. What possessed him all those years? A courage and curiosity to see where distant roads and nearby doorways might lead. An eye for the authentic and for what matters most. An urge to find words––the most precise, most meaningful ones. A need to structure small individual works into the framework of an unfolding life story. Many of the revelations he provides in these poems are now mine.

—Emilio DeGrazia, Emeritus Professor of English, Winona State University

In the middle of Steve McCown’s luminous book of poetry, there’s a hurricane. After the storm, the poet’s eye catches a bright yellow hummingbird feeder still unbroken amid the wreckage: “Its bright inner life, in the gloom,/was still visible, alluring./ We—displaced from our home,/adrift on the streets—hovered near.” This graceful book performs a kind of poetic salvage operation, rescuing small moments of beauty and meaning from the wreckage of life and the rising flood of time.

Rob Hardy, Poet Laureate of Northfield, Minnesota

No One Left Behind

An Unexpected Educational Adventure at Machu Picchu

Deb Pitton

$17.95 – Purchase a print copy online.

Professor Deb Pitton led a group of education and healthcare students to Peru and Machu Picchu in 2010. When rain swelled the mountain rivers, flooding downstream villages, the group was trapped and struggled to remain together waiting to be evacuated.

No One Left Behind, Deb Pitton’s personal account of what was to become a legendary study abroad trip is filled with humor and honesty. She spares no detail when it comes to describing the rewards and challenges of traveling with a group of college students who are seeing (most of them for the first time) a less privileged side of life. Those revelations, which are often noticed and appreciated by Pitton as she describes an event or interaction, form one of the recurring themes of the book. Another emergent theme has to do with the power of nature and how it can disrupt one’s best laid plans; readers who remember the news stories about the Gustavus Professors and students stranded in the mountains of Peru will perhaps share my amazement as the extent of the ordeal is unveiled. Deb does a wonderful job of detailing the many ways she and her co-leader, Mary Solberg, had to improvise, consult, and make immediate—sometimes scary—decisions. Anyone considering leading a group on a study-abroad trip would do well to read No One Left Behind, but perhaps—as the title suggests—the most important idea we are left with is that we all need to look out for each other and stick together—a goal that seems particularly relevant to the times.

—Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota Poet Laureate

Deb Pitton, Machu Picchu 2010.