Felt Along the Blood by Harry Brown (review)

Abstract

Harry Brown. FeltAlong the Blood. Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications , 2005. 93 pages. Paperback. $14.00 The title of Harry Brown's book is from a line in William Wordsworth 's "Tinctern Abbey:" ". . .felt in the blood and felt along the heart." A longer section of the work serves as an apt inscription because many of Brown's poems place the reader on the acres of gently rolling hills at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. His farm in Paint Lick could be eye-balled on a dividing line between the Bluegrass and the Appalachians. The area around Paint Lick is a patchwork of knobs, hollows and bottomlands; inspiration for Brown's poems, what he takes with him in his heart and blood when he is away at his job teaching at Eastern Kentucky University or further abroad in the world. The editor of this volume, Steven Cope, selected poems from Brown's four previously published collections, Paint Lick Idyll and Other Poems, Measuring Man and Other Poems, Ego's Eye and Other Poems, Everything Is Its Opposite and Other Poems, and from an unpublished manuscript tentatively titled "In Some Households the King is Soul." The poems were written over a thirty-seven-year span. Some in the book are new and previously unpublished. Cope has chosen well from the poet's works. In his forward the editor categorizes Brown's poetry in four distinct strains: pastoral; tongue in cheek melding reason with passion and intellect with emotion; communal poems, existential, philosophic; terse, almost aphoristic. Brown's pastoral poems show a gentleman farmer, not in the way of the farmer who never dips his hands into the soil but a gentle man and a farmer. And though he is still apt to surprise fellow-farmers by stopping his tractor to consult a field guide to wildflowers, in these poems, he reflects on days when he fenced with cedar and locust posts, graded tobacco, pulled calves, mowed hay. And like the shepherd who knows his sheep, he counts his cattle every night and knows each by number if not name. In "Becoming Cow; Or, Eternal Arrival," Brown moves from the blooms of the daffodils he picks for his desk to the birth of a calf. Both described in imagistic language, show the reader that these things are eternal, unchanging. Brown, at his desk, ponders events back on the farm. It's almost spring, proof abounds. Daffodils begin to burgeon, those suns atop green straws; stem upon stem I cut today to make a sunburst for my desk. Yesterday I saw a stem hanging from 102 a springing Angus heifer to say she's ripe to show a big black bloom. The clear dangling hints new breath knocking at the gates, a soft black snout soon to push, push toward out and air. Or in rhythmic "Through My Narrow Chinks" he infuses the everyday scene with spiritual quest. It's daily difficult to see My traffic must be wholly aimed Toward God's impossibility. The trick I'm up to now Is how to rise before Him mornings Or catch Him in the open evenings After dark, perhaps by moon. I have the faintest feeling He hides in the white of the sycamore Along Paint Lick Creek, or in the pinoak's bark Behind the southwest corner of the shed. But He hides. I never find His eyes. I never see them flee. Tongue firmly in cheek, in "The Ascetic Chauvinist; Or, What is the Chief End of Man," Brown turns a sardonic humor on himself, the professor admiring the physical attributes of young women on campus. Keep, oh Lord, from me the jaunty swish down the hall so light, so quick, so smart it must be life, high joy (voice or no, for the eye suffices); from me the slow sashay, lolling, strolling sway that lies without a single syllable, I AM THAT I AM, . . . (Old Harry at his finest prayer), Whereas child-like humor is present in "What We Learned at Raven Run" written for a young friend. A favorite meal of the Great Horned Owl is skunk. This feller's appetite, as you can tell, is Texas taller than his...