Poetry Book #4, Coming Soon

Many of you have been reading my poems here on Appalachian Ground, or supporting my writing (and now painting) journey on Patreon.

You’ve cheered for me as I have enjoyed some lovely accolates and published three books, Appalachian Ground, Wolf Laundry, and Reflection With Crow.

When I began to paint, I put the poetry on hold for a bit. I knew there were about 125 poems waiting to come out in my fourth (final?) book, but I just didn’t have the energy to do the work of putting them all together, editing, and creating a book.

Recently I started doing that work.

The new book appears to be comprised of 5 sections. One will be very familiar to you, if you’ve read even a small handful of my poems—it’s all about these Appalachian mountains where I live and write. The second section is about family; my own childhood, the people and places I come from, and more.

It’s in the second section that I talk about my grandfather, Burley Creech, who is for me the anchor and grace note of this new book. Because while many of the poems in the rest of this project cover some dark and often painful territory, he symbolizes hope.

The title “Shoulders Made of Birds” is a phrase from a poem I wrote about him. One of my strongest memories of my grandfather involved a bird he called Jenny Wren, who often came to find him around the barn or in the fields where he tended crops and cattle. Jenny Wren would sit on his shoulder and listen as he talked quietly, quoted hundreds of poems by heart, and sang to the cows and river and weeds on his daily farm rounds.

You can see some photos of my grandfather in this post, and read one of my poems about him in this one.

And here’s the poem that gave me the title for this book, which was originally published by Empty House Press in December 2021:

MY GRANDFATHER WAS A FORTUNE TELLER

My grandfather was a fortune teller,
a man whose shoulders were made of birds.
He gave us days and more days,
wrens and swifts scattering toward the future.

He kept a mouth harp in his pocket
and played without warning—
in corn fields, tobacco barns, or
on the landing upstairs
where all our bedrooms opened
like little caves, where
we grew silent, tying our yearning
with silver threads to the sounds
of dinner finished, sleep waiting.

He played to the spirits of the deep
on our behalf, making altars
with wheels of stars and carved owls
for night’s children,
things to make them smile.

Without words, ours was the cup
of each day poured out, renewed,
poured out again.

 

I didn’t explicitly tell the story of Jenny Wren in the poem, but I think I shared the idea of this amazing man who loved and lifted up the wild world in the same gentle and encompassing way he loved all his children and grandchildren (and more besides).

I’ve written many poems about Burley Creech, but my memory of him with the little wren on his shoulder both wonderfully encapsulates the man I loved, and also lifts the reader toward hope as I share some darker poems in the third and fourth sections of the book.

In those poems, I talk about my father’s terrible injury, the pandemic years, my struggles in learning to live with Parkinson’s, and other personal and cultural griefs. Although many of those are grim, I think readers will also catch sight of gleaming lines of hope woven into and between them, like bright threads in a bird’s next.

The closing section is a bit of a catch-all. It holds some of my most playful and experimental work, a small handful of recurring characters (notably XX and Dashbord Hula Woman) who came to play, and other odds and ends.

Overall, it’s quite a journey, covering—in actual years and in spirit—all of the time I spent writing poetry, beginning to end.

About half of these poems have been published somewhere, but the rest have never been seen, except for within my Patreon account.

My intention is to do the editing in the next month or two, and soon thereafter I hope you will enjoy seeing it finally become a book to be held, read, and shared.