50 Poems From The Mountain
A small book of poems aligned with the Chinese poets of the Song dynasty.
Here is the forward from my recently published book - 50 Poems From The Mountain. I hope some will dip into it. Preview in a browser here. Find the paperback and Kindle on Amazon. Here is an album of photos from hikes up the mountain - random selection to give you an idea of what I was doing, where I was.
My few meager thoughts, some call them poems, written in Matagalpa, Nicaragua during 2019 and 2020.
Each morning I'd rise and take the dogs up the mountain, Cerro Apante, a nature reserve that served as a background to the farmhouse, the "quinta" we rented. We'd hike up many different trails, always arriving at the huge cross at the top.
I wanted to get back to nature and simplicity. I grew up on a farm and have always yearned for that quiet, that time beyond time that nature offers. For my own health but also just to feel alive again. To touch the elemental, something I think we all have lost living in our boxes, stuffed together, only scampering for a few moments on weekends or holidays, into nature's lush bosom.
I brought a whole chest of books with me. My children. One of the books was Rexroth's - 100 Poems From The Chinese. As a poet, they reflected my own time and place. Poems of simplicity, set in the arms of mother nature. Each day I'd read them and reflect. Soon, after each day's march up the mountain, I'd return and write my own poems under the ones I was reading in the book. This collection is the sum of that activity.
The directness of the Chinese poets of the Song dynasty hits you. It's something sadly lacking in today's too fancy, too sophisticated poetry by MFL graduates, numbed into sophistry.
I'm sure Gary Snyder, Sam Hamill, Ezra Pound, and Rexroth would agree. Those who I value and who have come before me. If poetry is anything, it is freedom. And freedom doesn't seek complexity - it is direct and IS. We need more poets to tell things as they are. Yes, there is enough room for many kinds of poetry but directness is an approach most poets need to master, in one form or another.
And also the recognition of nature as a primacy, something beyond man, beyond the modern pomposity the world dresses itself in. We have divorced ourselves from the natural world and I see that as the true road to our end, our ruin. I don't need to bore you with an essay about it - I'm sure you understand. We all understand but the hard thing is to do, to not align oneself with that devil.
So I give you these few poems, these crumbs off the table of my homeless mind. I do hope they bring you some sustenance and meaning. A green fuse for your greener soul. For that is the true purpose of poetry and the poet - to bring to others a sense of wonder and the sacred for this world we live in - here and now.
Yours,
David Deubelbeiss
