When I was a child, my parents had a favorite vacation place – the mountains. When you’re a flatlander or an “indented” flatlander in a subsidence-prone city like New Orleans, the mountains seem almost like a catapult to the heavens. The focus was the Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
We stayed in places like Gatlinburg, Tennessee, before it was discovered; Luray, Virginia, with its caverns; and Cherokee, North Carolina, which to my childhood wonder, had real Native Americans (still called “Indians” in the 1960s). One of my most vivid memories is the family hiking up a mountain in Virginia to an overlook point, with the Shenandoah Valley laid out below.
The mountains, those unmovable heights of rock, dirt, and trees, brought awe, wonder, and a sense of peace. Occasionally, the snaky roads through them brought bears and cubs. (Everyone pulled over the see the cubs; few stopped for the full-grown bears.)
For poet Beth Copeland, the mountains brought peace and something else – healing. A relationship had ended, and she moved to the mountains for solace. It was perhaps inevitable that she would write about it, and I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart: Poems is the result. And what a beautiful result it is. When I began reading, I didn’t expect to find some of my own story, but that’s what happened.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Some Thursday Readings
Wandering thoughts: When my legs stopped working, my mind carried on – Sean Walsh at The Critic Magazine.
A Place to Stand: On Reading Poetry – Rachel Welcher at Mere Orthodoxy.
“Summer Morn in New Hampshire,” poem by Claude McKay – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Canto XXX of Dante’s Paradise – translation by Stephen Binns at Society of Classical Poets.
Little we see in nature – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street on Dwell by Simon Armitage.
No comments:
Post a Comment