Raven Raves, Rants, Reviews and Listings

Breaking Ground, by Paul Hunter

Silverfish Review Press,

P.O. Box 3541, Eugene, OR 97403

2004, 85 pages, $12.00

ISBN 1-878851-20-9

Reviewed by Thomas Hubbard

After the tribes were decimated, disarmed and displaced to reservations, farmers came to change our vast expanses into croplands. Saddened as tribal elders were to lose their way of life, they must have recognized and respected the character of hard-laboring, clear-thinking honest men whose work ethic still survives among many family farmers.

Paul Hunter's collection of poetry picks up farm life well after the land was “settled,” celebrating this surviving strength of character in grand style.

Hunter has written a picture book. Moving pictures, one might say. On every page, men and their animals and vehicles and tools work steadily, faster when need be, anticipating the next chore or pleasure, perhaps, but not enough to divert attention from what's at hand. Kids run and cavort through the barnyard. Conversations we overhear tend mostly to plain talk about the season-to-season, day-to-day small things. Watching the pictures unfold, we learn from each how some seemingly small thing is actually a very big thing.

In the first poem, “Runt,” we are kids chasing a piglet, one runty enough for us to pick it out from the others, until Uncle Edwin tells us:

...running is bad for them
and if we will only leave him be
we can have him...

So over the next few weeks we “leave him be” and watch:

...his tail starts to curl his snout turns
hairy ragged and rough
and soon he is just like the others
all getting ready for market...

We can't tell him from the rest of the litter, and the game of chasing him slides away into a history soon forgotten by children, only to be much later recalled, perhaps, as occasion may demand after we become adults.

So here is a poem about kids tormenting a pig, and the adult distracting them, ending the torment with no threats, no guilt. Right along with the kids and the pig, Hunter demonstrates one of the ways Midwestern farm life passes down gentleness and values from one generation to the next.

Without realizing how Uncle Edwin smoothly finessed them, the kids commit this whole episode to forgotten history. But who can read this poem without realizing that when these kids notice their own kids chasing the runt of some future litter, they will remember just how to handle the situation?

Hunter doesn't create such fine moving pictures from words by merely telling nice stories and giving subtle lessons in childrearing. Hunter's writing carries the glow of virtuosity. With flawless craftsmanship he constructs easily flowing lines so that reading is effortless. His language tends toward conversational, but not just any conversation. His is the stage of conversation during which wine may spill unnoticed and coffee chills in the cup. Intense.

Punctuation is assumed. These poems may cause spontaneous pacing and gesturing. In “To Market,” you are the farmer, milking, listening to:

...the tinny radio
tucked up under rafters
shit-splattered even there
quarter of five in the a.m.
grain prices beef prices futures

tell yourself settle for this
before it goes any farther
off into greed or depression...

And you know the market can catch you, has caught you before, can

...beat you flat like a hailstorm
maybe already too late...

So you load your pigs into the pickup and haul them to market.

Like the farmers he brings to life, Hunter uses only a bare minimum of words, keeping them close and releasing them reluctantly. But he never strips a line so far down as to reach that self-conscious “poesy language” that might leave a reader wondering, after all, just what happened to whom.

Amid such economy, each word must bear significant weight without seeming to. In the collection's longest poem, “Reckoning,” Hunter pays homage to William Ward, an old farmer. A conversational six-line description of the man's hands becomes a character sketch.

3
The little fingers of both hands
would not lie straight
from being wrapped around
a hickory handle sixty-some-odd years
and even pushed down on a table
wouldn't flatten...

Here speaks a poet whose depiction of his forebears' lifestyle spans easily from the quiet tale of William Ward to the ordered confusion of threshing day. In “Threshing,” Hunter captures all the chaos and teamwork of this yearly event, the way it pulls neighbors together from one farm to the next until all are serviced.

...then the tarp is rolled back
the rust-splotched elderly machine
drawn from the dark under cover
to the barnyard the accustomed level place
its steel-lugged wheels chocked
oilcan lifted flywheel given a spin
to remind it of its many motions
how it rustles whirs and clicks
and all the while on its axles rocks
and with oil and grease to the fittings
each bearing every moving part
then the drive belt slung to the tractor
blocked twenty feet off
and pampered adjusted set running...

And later:

...and the women up before dawn bake
and stir chop and set creaking tables
sawhorses and planks on the lawn...

Hunter has organized this collection temporally, from childhood to retirement, from spring to autumn, from wonder and play to harvest and reconciliation. And in “Outskirts,” he finishes with a reminder of our longing for what has nearly disappeared.

2
Maybe to see what more there is to living
hold round warm beginnings in their hands
city gardeners on our block kept
chickens that would crow and cluck
expectant brooding triumphant
their rhythms upsetting and waking us
though they would apologize and claim
it was only done to save a buck...
.

For those of us who have lived a long time, Breaking Ground shows us pictures from our memory, returning us to a reality where we can recognize characters, heroes even, of our past. For young writers still struggling to grasp the difference between writing and writing, this is a valuable example of the latter. Either way, wear it out.

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Since retiring from his teaching position on Tulalip Rez, Thomas Hubbard has published Wisdom for a Dance in the Street, (a spoken word CD) by Dave Caserio, Nailed to The Sky, (a poetry collection) by M. Anne Sweet, and Junkyard Dogz, a chapbook of his own poetry and graphics, all under his gazoobi tales imprint. These add to his previously published Nail and other Hardworking Poems (Year of the Dragon Press, 1994) and Children Remeber Their Fathers, an anthology of poems about fathers. In the works are an anthology of poems about mothers, and a collection of writings to be entitled Living With Proud Mary. He is currently gathering works for an anthology of indigenous writers. He lives aboard a sloop at the Port of Everett.