Poets and Poems: Frank Stanford and “The Light the Dead See”

Frank Stanford was born in Mississippi in 1948, and adopted the day he was born. Four years later, his mother married A.F. Stanford, a much older contractor in Memphis. Until his death eight years later, Stanford raised the young boy as his own. When he was 21, Frank discovered that his mother had adopted him – he had always believed, or been led to believe, that she was his birth mother.

We can smile at William Wordsworth’s line “The Child is father of the Man,” but poet Frank Stanford embodied it in both his life and his poetry.

I discovered Stanford while reading poet Leon Stokesbury’s most recent collection You are Here. Stokesbury, who teaches in the creative writing program at Georgia State University, received his M.A. and MFA degrees from the University of Arkansas, and there is his connection to Stanford. Stanford and his mother moved to Arkansas after his stepfather’s death, and in 1966 he entered the University of Arkansas. He was enrolled in the graduate poetry workshop at the university at the same time Stokesbury was in the MFA program.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Pat Durmon’s “Push Mountain Road”

Highway 341 is a generally north-south road in Baxter County in north central Arkansas. Its approximately 34 miles of length (with extensions) meander in the Arkansas Ozarks. The highway is also known as Push Mountain Road, and that’s the title poet Pat Durmon has given to her latest collection of poetry – Push Mountain Road (which certainly sounds more interesting, and poetic, than Highway 341).

Comprised of 118 poems (and one introductory poem), the collection is a celebration – of people, nature, relationships, the everyday, the small things (like making the crust for a quiche), and the larger things (like sitting in a radiation waiting room). Durmon combines an almost childlike wonder with the wisdom gained through a lifetime of experience.

In this poem, an observation about the declining afternoon light becomes something much more:

 

Open Doors

welcome

the failing

afternoon light

bellowing bullfrogs

a spider quilting

between porch rails

a wood-wild road

zigzagging

up the mountain

a herd of deer

coming our

from dense

ragged woods

where they cross

a pasture

to go down to the river

and catch grace

off guard

Pat Durmon

It is that “something much more” that characterizes Durmon’s poems. And the poem cover the landscape that’s extends outward from Push Mountain Road – the small towns, the people, the trees and streams, animals in the forests, the mountains and the seasons.

Durmon is the author of Light and Shadows in a Nursing Home: Poems and Blind Curves. Her poems have been published in such journals as Rattle, Main Street Rag, Poetry East, Cyclamens and Blades, Between the Lines, and Lucidity. A former teacher and now retired mental health counselor, she currently facilitates two support groups.

The poems of Push Mountain Road are the poems of rest and refreshment, a place to come to and abide as the world’s craziness swirls around.

Top photograph: Little Red River in the Arkansas Ozarks, via Arkansas.com.