"A Child's Year" by Chris Yokel

If there is such a poetry genre as “gentle voice,” Chris Yokel may be the master of it. His newest collection, A Child’s Year: Poems, only underscores that. Its 43 poems display a quiet, gentle beauty that force you to stop and consider the world around you.

The poems are organized by seasons. More importantly, they are written with the simplicity of a child’s heart. We experience Lent as a child, we wonder at tragedies like plane crashes as a child, we walk through woods and taste snow like a child. Elements of wonder and subtle amazement permeate the poems and their subjects. 

Consider the mountains, where God “walks the stones in a whirlwind.”

Another World

The mountains are always drawing

us toward worlds unknown—

realms shrouded in mist at the peak of heaven

where God walks the stones

in a whirlwind,

and we long to behold his

face in a cloudbreak

till our souls are shaken

and stripped of all dross,

and we descend with both

a little less, and

a little more than who we were.

Chris Yokel

Yokel has published several books of poetry, including A Year in the Weetamoo Woods, Elements, Sketches, and Sunrise. His poems have appeared in The Curator, Tweetspeak Poetry, The Molehill and other publications. He’s a regular contributor to The Rabbit Room. He has also recorded and released two CDs, “The Rain That Falls” and “The Color and The Light.” Currently teaching writing and literature to college students, he lives in Massachusetts.

Reading A Child’s Year is hearing the admonition to “suffer the little children unto me.” I’m finding licorice again on a shelf in the garage. I watch my father make snow ice cream for the first time. I’m playing hide-and-seek in the woods near my childhood home. And I’m reminded of what it means to have a simple heart.

Related:

My review of Chris Yokel’s A Year in Weetamoo Woods. 

Top photograph by Jordan Whitt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Chris Yokel’s “A Year in Weetamoo Woods”

Some 40 miles west of St. Louis is one of my favorite places – Shaw Nature Reserve, which all of us residents call by the name it was originally called – “The Arboretum.” It’s more than 2,400 acres of woods and trails, with some managed gardens but mostly woods. A favorite walk is the river trail, out and down to the Meramec River, one of the reserve’s boundaries.

When you’re mostly a dweller of city and suburb, woods become an escape and respite, but also a point of reference. They are a place to go to clarify and consider, a point of reference and a means of reflection. Thoreau did it at Walden, and Wendell Berry has done it in Kentucky, but you don’t have to be famous to seek out the calm and silence of nature.

Teacher, songwriter and poet Chris Yokel has done it, too, at a nature preserve in Rhode Island called Weetamoo Woods. From the fall of 2011 through the summer of 2012, Yokel traveled from his home in Massachusetts to find reflection, and he collected it as A Year in Weetamoo Woods: Poems.

The poems are divided by the four seasons. The woods change, of course, from the dying of fall and white of winter to the spring (when “bursting buds / betray the signs of / the gardener”) and on to the hot richness of summer. Here is “Fallen Ones,” from the winter section but offering a glimpse of the spring, and life, to come.

Stark against the sun

they silhouette the hill—

broken trees

like shafts of shivered spears,

a memorial to the

Battle of the Four Winds

whose rage twisted ancient ones

from earth.

I feel its gale-borne arrows

pierce my heart with memory,

Yet here amid the blasted trunks,

the supple birch springs up

both strong and straight.

The poems from the Weetamoo Woods become poems about life, birth, regeneration, beauty, art, imagination, and faith. They are about the woods, yes, and about the life of the poet in the woods. But in a very quiet way, the poems become our lives, too, our experiences, our reflections.

A Year in Weetamoo Woods does something else, too. It serves as a reminder that we all need time for thoughtful consideration of our lives, and there’s no better place to do that than the woods.

It’s time for me to make another visit to my own woods. And I’ll bring these poems with me.

(By the way, Chris is going to be leading a workshop for students on J.R.R. Tolkien at Tweetspeak Poetry, covering The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and Tolkien Life. You can find the details at Tweetspeak.)

Photograph of Weetmoo Woods: Eventful

Seasons

We sit, we listen, we know

the afternoon sun is fading

irreversibly into night, the warmth

of the day is fading inevitably

into coldness of night, the walls

of stone and stained glass offering

some light, some warmth. We move

closer, huddling, feeling the chill,

remembering spring's explosion

into color and summer’s hot sands

and brilliant glare and even

the beautiful decay of fall 

with its slanted, withdrawing light.

Outside, a bird is singing.

Photograph by Larisa Koshkina via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Four Seasons of a Man's Life

Today, over at Chris Goforth's blog, Goforth Journal, I have a guest post on the four seasons of a man's life, which means, of course, that I'm old enough to be able to talk about the four seasons of a man's life. Anyway, check it out, and let me (and Chris) know what you think.