I’ve just bought a book by poet Bruce Snider based on a couple of poems by him that I discovered on the Gwarlingo website. The thing that drew me to them straight away were the vivid descriptions of his hometown of Paradise, Indiana. I was struck by the way he uses landscape as a means of expression and also as a powerful kind of grounding force to that expression. The poems are rich with descriptions of the land, it’s trees and highways, ditches and rivers and these are woven with moments from the past so that somehow he makes these intensely personal experiences into something more accessible, something more universal that we can all understand.

The suicide of the writers cousin ‘Nick’ is at the centre of the collection, simply titled ‘Paradise, Indiana’ but the poems are never indulgent or sentimental. He manages to convey the weight of human grief and loss in a few carefully chosen words that create vivid flashes of imagery, his landscape acting as a kind of compass for memory as he seeks to make sense of the inexplicable.

I especially like this one, called ‘Epitaph’. The images are by Connemara based photographer and hill walking guide Inez Streefkerk.

Epitaph

Because I could be written anywhere,

I loved the hard surface of the blade,

my name carved into barn doors, desktops,

the peeled face of a shag-bark hickory.

I pressed my whole weight into it, letters

grooved deep as the empty

field rows along Tri-Lakes* where I’d seen

my cousin Nick buried in ground so hard

they had to heat the dirt with lamps

before they could dig. I gutted squirrels

my grandmother fried, hanging

skins from the window,

and with the same knife gouged a B

at the base of the frozen creek bank,

the season breaking

like the rose our teacher, Miss Jane,

dipped in nitrogen so it would shatter.

There were more atoms, she claimed,

in the letter O, than people in the entire state.

I could feel God inside that letter,

the vast sky configured, buds scrawled

on the black limbs of trees.

Trucks carried spring feed down

Highway 9 as I wove through the headstones,

tracing names in the late frost,

looking for Nick’s plot

with the wax white roses,

his lucky fishing lure. I could sense

him down there, satin-lined,

curled like the six-toed cat

we’d found bloated in the creek, alive

with lice and maggots. Sometimes

I was sure I could hear him, restless,

waiting for me, the Wabash*

pushing its icy waters, my tongue

humming with the fizz. It never ended,

that stretch of road snaking back home

like an artery through my own heart

where an owl gripped a rat in its claw

over I-80*. I’d put my hands in my pockets

and walk, dreaming of the places I’d go,

the things I’d do, the dump rising

to meet me at the edge of town,

chrome bumpers twisted as the owner

himself, withered arm swinging a fist.

I waited for something to escape –

mouse darting from a glove box, oil

from a cracked sump. I could stand

on a crushed Chevy, feeling it all

thaw inside me: asphalt

and barbed wire, cows and steaming

pails of milk, even the graveyard

rising, new stones nursing old griefs,

slow bones and winter’s cherry trees

making their long walk to leaf.

taken from ‘Paradise, Indiana’ by Bruce Snider

 ‘Twisted Oak’ by Inez Streefkerk

Cover image ‘Birch Bark’ by Inez Streefkerk

*Tri-Lakes

*Wabash

* I-80