Vertebrae Poems 1978-1994

Green, Samuel

ISBN 10: 0910055181 / ISBN 13: 9780910055185

Published by Eastern Washington University Press, 1994

About this Item

Poetry. Inscribed and signed. Hardback.

Seller Inventory # 16931

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Vertebrae Poems 1978-1994
• Publisher: Eastern Washington University Press
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0910055181
• ISBN 13: 9780910055185
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: First edition.
• Condition: Very good. Good dust wrapper.
• Signed: Signed by the author

About this title

Synopsis

Here is an account of life on an island, close to earth and sea and the things and creatures of a specific place, uttered as declaration or dialogue or meditation, with the soul and sense of a remarkably gifted poet enriching every line, every page. Linked as sequence or by subject to make the patterns of backbones, the poems relate the day-to-day affairs of one who has chosen, with his wife and neighbors for company, to live where the elemental takes on the flesh of meaning in particular, closely observed ways. Every experience is thus as charged and natural and profoundly moving as the sound of the human voice, carried across water from the trees and rocks of the shoreline.
Through these poems we hear the voice of one who cherishes language as the vital force connecting us to each other - one who knows how vital the poetic resources of language are to express our deepest feelings, fear, anger, joy, love. And everywhere we encounter, and are refreshed by, Sam Green's acceptance of the poet's status in the world he wakes and works and makes love and sleeps in. Strength and tenderness are here as assuredly as the woodsman's grip on his ax handle, and the player's fingers over the strings of his guitar.

Reviews

Green's slim output is unignorably good, thoroughly West Coast stuff, full of the ocean and fishing, felling timber and cutting wood, gardening in mostly cool weather, and basically, living sparely in that incomparable Pacific Northwest rain forest. It would recall Gary Snyder's work more than it does except that there are no Zen references or ecological data or East Asian and Native American lore in it. Rather, Green speaks plainly of his own experience--plainly and immediately; his "I" (when it is not otherwise assigned--as it so evocatively is, in the first two poems in the book, to "Grandmother, Milking" and "Grandfather, Hauling in the Nets") is not egoistic but lets us take in just the experience it reports, sans the sauce of learning or interpretation. Moreover, Green has chosen to experience life so elementally that the record of it conduces, time and again, to a religious attitude toward existence, as much in us as in him. Ray Olson