Wild Green Light

David Adams Richards, Margo Wheaton

• Publisher: Pottersfield Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781989725443
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Wild Green Light is a collaboration that brings together the poetry of acclaimed author David Adams Richards and award-winning writer Margo Wheaton. Drawing upon a fiercely shared passion for the natural world – as well as a literary friendship that has spanned more than two decades – each of these New Brunswick-born writers pays powerful tribute to a rapidly disappearing rural way of life. Atmospheric and spare, these poems take us into a world of deep woods, abandoned fields, kitchen tables, and back roads.

The book is divided into two sections, representing the unique voice and perspective of each author. Wheaton's section consists of two elegant lyric poems, as well as a fifteen-part sequence written in a poetic form known as "ghazals." Sorrowing and precise, the poems in this sequence survey the remains of her working-class childhood home, a once-thriving place, ravaged by family alcoholism and despair. Both celebratory and grieving, these poems grapple intensely with larger issues of working-class poverty, limited choices, and the chaotic legacy of addiction.

The book's opening section gathers together twenty lyric poems by Richards, each one steeped in his own direct, visceral experience of his beloved Miramichi. Bold, plain-spoken, and elegiac, these deeply felt poems explore the grand terrain of love and loss and are marked with the same purposefulness, acuity, and compassion that appear in Richards' fiction.

Alike and different, these two writers share a devotion to the physical landscapes of New Brunswick and call us to fiercely cherish the beauty of rural life and experience.

I

David Adams Richards

Introduction

For most of my life I have been a prose writer, but over the years I have written poems, and have published them intermittently. These poems were written in the last twenty-five years and deal with many of the same subjects my novels have. They deal with the land, the Miramichi, the people on it, and the goodness, generosity, and spiritual kindness of ordinary people. I hope to continue to write poems as time goes on, and time gets shorter. I am grateful to Margo Wheaton, a true poet, who is allowing my work to be published beside hers.

Some of these poems have been published before – in The Antigonish Review and The Pottersfield Portfolio, in The Telegraph Journal, and in my book Murder and Other Essays. But one-third of these poems have not been published before. In fact, this is my first poetry book in forty years.

– David Adams Richards

Miramichi, New Brunswick

December 2020

For Such Men Who Fought In Battles

There is no longer any home here

Or anywhere, beyond the long glare of sun and

Snow. It has gone away; my friend dead

And old friends dying,

And where we once snared rabbits and fished for trout

Is now a bike path where young children bike about

In spandex shorts.

And no darkness seems to enter in the trees

And no train whistle sounds out lonesome or otherwise

Anymore.

And no drunken men lay down in their urine

In the long summer grasses

Where we as children used to help them

Up, haul them by their arms to get them to their knees.

Oh, what grand beauty in their soiled faces;

A nickel falling out of turned-out pockets

And landing in those lost, forgotten places

The last drink of wine un-drunk

And the grass swept by uneven breeze.

Their eyes privy to a thousand proud disgraces,

Remembering the swaggering bullets

Of that disremembered war;

Wine allowing them to fight great battles yet,

Scarred by battles they could not forget.

And yes, there were wild berries there;

And yes, the scope of wild berry trees

And the sweet smell of water

And Jimmy and Muzzy, Brian and Me;

All of us on the grade of hill

Helping to his feet a man

Who fought valiantly, fighting still

For Country and Crown

At Ypres, Vimy or

Passchendaele;

And it was we children, young boys

Of eight or nine

Who straightened their shirts,

And searched and found their hats

And capped their wine

And lifted them up, sacredly

Yes, quite sacredly

From the ground.

One October Day

I will die in October;

Sometime in the afternoon

When the sun is red in the sky

Against the cooling trees,

Their leaves already scattered

Through lost gullies and onto bleak grasses.

And the wind, too, has come up

And wisps in small hysterias

Against the open porch door.

I will die that afternoon,

Alone on the road near the black gravestones;

I will fall fast like an arrow

Leaving you to remember the

Broken stories of our youth

Sang fiercely at nighttime

In praise of our wild and forgotten river.

In The Rome Airport

(For Robin)

In t...