Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 134
- Language: English
- Date Published: October, 2020
- ISBN: 978-1-953252-04-3
Praise
When I pick up a book by Andrew Schelling, I expect it to be a red clay pot buried in pine needles. I know it will hold within it everything that has occurred in the lands surrounding, the flick of the weasel’s tail and the cry of the kestrel, the tender lack of friends gone on ahead, and the wisdom of many cultures. These poems seem written not by hand but by heart. Listen to the oldest / of books. —James Thomas Stevens
I genuinely enjoyed this manuscript and will enjoy it even more once it’s a real book in my hands. There were at least ten poems that gave me the thing I’m looking for (what that is I couldn’t say). The Facts at Dog Tank Spring is less a book than a world: Rockies and Himalayas, humans and bears, Youtube videos and pictograph panels, deep past and blossoming present. As Andrew Schelling puts it in one poem, “Life looks bigger.” That’s true, and that’s a relief. —Leath Tonino
Excerpt
Forms of Writing
The classic Chinese account
that writing starts with bird tracks in the sand
has its appeal
Catullus, himself notably
indiscrete, says some things
should only get written
on water
you hear there’s
a natural history of type fonts
the Washington lever-action press
doth squeak
ephemera from a few high
quality print shops.
Firewood arrives from Granby,
all of it lodgepole, all of it beetle-kill.
Local pines
reclaim their ground where the Black
Tiger Fire once burnt
Bark beetle heartwood bore,
inky squiggles, indigo curlicues,
inventive dingbats
&&&& in many hues
bacteria blues
Now cabinet makers covet the wood
We all leave traces where we’ve passed.
spindly tracks
ciphers inscribed about the post,
right where the bark’s been scraped—
telling old escapades, romance,
now make a better story
than most.
Author
Andrew Schelling, poet and translator. Author of twenty-odd books including From the Arapaho Songbook and The Real People of Wind & Rain. In the 1970s studied classics with Norman O. Brown and ecology of mind with Gregory Bateson at U.C. Santa Cruz, then up to Berkeley for Sanskrit while editing samizdat poetry journals. In 1990 he moved over the Continental Divide to the Front Range of the Southern Rockies with wife and daughter. Has worked on land use, wolf reintroduction, defiance to dams, protection of wilderness. Eight books of poetry translated from Sanskrit & related tongues. His study Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture is a folkloric account of bohemian poets, old time West Coast storytelling, natural history, cattle rustling, & linguistics. Many years teaching poetry and Sanskrit at Naropa University, he lives in the mountains west of Boulder, Colorado.