Category: John Daniel

While searching for a poetry book to read to get back to posting, I found John Daniel’s Of Earth: New and Selected Poems with several poems already marked.  The name didn’t ring any bells, but I wondered if I had already posted about it and had just forgotten doing so. I searched my website and found that I had, indeed, published a review of his first book, Common Ground, in 2007 and had raved about it. 

I hadn’t written anything about Of Earth, though.  After looking at “12” repeatedly without knowing what to say about it, I can guess why I didn’t write about it when I finished the book.  That’s not too surprising because writing is much harder than reading. I have many books I’ve finished reading on my Kindle that I keep thinking I should write about, but haven’t been motivated enough to do so ( or, increasingly,  haven’t been able to figure out what I want to say about them). Writer’s block is a bitch.  

I liked Daniel’s Of Earth almost as much as I liked Common Ground, probably because we have many common interests. I’ve spent so much time recently reading Chinese and Japanese literature recently that I was pleased that Daniel used an Ens? to delineate different works. 

ChatGPT describes an Ens? as a 

single brushstroke circle from Zen tradition that embodies emptiness, wholeness, and presence. It captures the very essence of Taoist wu wei and the still strength that “holds others steady.” While it comes from Zen Buddhism, its spirit aligns beautifully with Taoist thought:

• It’s open or closed, like the yin-yang turning.

• It’s effortless, like the Tao’s silent work.

• It contains all things by containing nothing.

In his preface, Daniel notes that death and Nature are two of his major poetic themes, both of which appear in “The Unseen,” a sequence of twelve short poems ending with:  

12

If the way is anywhere, it's here 
in the dodge and mingle of mustard flowers 
flattening as the wind comes on, 
in the blue eucalyptus swirling wild 
with a shimmer of water-sound, 
and even in the stiff oak limbs 
that stir as if remembering just now 
what motion is. It doesn't seem 
so difficult, this fluid aimlessness, 
this ease with which things bend 
as they hold firm — what flows in trees 
and ripples silvery through the grass
is loosening my fearbound spirit. 
that thinking tried and tried to free. 
If I can learn this limbering, 
if I can dance this Earthly dance 
like all things touched by wind, 
when the hour comes I might be ready 
to swirl loose from all I know. 

I’ve found my way, and I’ve been “here.” When Bill and I used to hike regularly, pushing to reach as high as we could go in a day, we would often eat lunch while philosophizing about Life, Death, and Nature at the turnaround. What better subject when standing on the top of Angel’s Rest overlooking the whole Columbia River to the east and Portland to the west?

Hiking has always been my preferred escape from the problems that tended to overwhelm me at home or at work. There is a “fluid aimlessness” in hiking through a forest or up a mountain that makes me forget my problems.   

Though I haven’t spent much time thinking about Death, I know enough about thinking that I’m sure it doesn’t do much to free a “fearbound” spirit. 

Strangely enough, I recently bought Bruce Cockburn’s album O Sun O Moon and thought that the song “Colin Went Down to the Water” did a better job of explaining this poem than I could.  

The whole song seems to capture the mood of Daniel’s poem, but the lines

Colin went down to the water
Bound for the infinite, finally unbound
Freed in the spirit, a way forward found
Into the current, no slowing down

seem particularly apt.

Somewhere in the past, someone recommended or I read something that made me put John Daniel’s Common Ground on my Amazon wish list, and boy am I glad that I did. I read the whole 62 pages today, and ended up marking 11 poems that I really like, any one of which I could have cited as a poem well worth reading. Considering that both Denise Levertov and Wallace Stegner wrote recommendations for the book, I guess that’s not surprising.

Probably even more important, though, is that I share a common experience with Daniel, both having spent considerable time on both sides of Oregon’s Cascade mountains. Those experiences seem to have led us to very similar views of nature and man’s relationship to nature.

I was amazed that there was barely a single poem that I couldn’t identify with, a rarity even in those poets I most love. It’s impossible to show the many similarities without citing most of the book, but this poem

Ourselves

When the throaty calls of sandhill cranes
echo across the valley, when the rimrock flares
incandescent red, and the junipers
are flames of green on the shortgrass hills,

in that moment of last clear light
when the world seems ready to speak its name,
meet me in the field alongside the pond.
Without careers for once, without things to do,

without dreams or anger or the rattle of fears,
we’ll ask how it can be that we walk this ground
and know that we walk, alive in a world
that didn’t have to be beautiful, alive

in a world that doesn’t have to be.
With no answers, just ourselves and silence,
we’ll listen for the song that waits to be learned,
the song that moves through the passing light.

does as well as any single poem in the book of showing how similar our views are.

Thankfully, I’ve been blessed by many moments like this where nature seemed to speak to me directly, both through wildlife and the sheer beauty of the setting. It’s these kinds of moments that make all the effort of backpacking into the wilderness worthwhile. When backpacking, there is no career, there is nothing to do — other than prepare a few simple meals.

During those long meditative walks, you learn as much about yourself as you do about nature’s magnificence. You begin to learn the “sound of nature,” the great AUM that underlies existence.