Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 198
- Language: English
- Date Published: May 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-14-8
Praise
George Kalamaras’s new book is a love song for the West, his adopted home country, but a darkly, exuberantly complicated and far-reaching one, packed with close observation, deep knowledge of history and natural history, and linguistic fireworks—not to mention a profound love and respect for the region and its creatures, human and otherwise. These expansive poems are enriched by years of experience, immersion in the landscapes of Colorado and the region, and fellow travelers of the best sort (William Stafford, Georgia O’Keeffe, Kenneth Rexroth, and a host of others). By turns elegiac, celebratory, and visionary, this generous collection takes us on a rich, rewarding journey through Western landscapes and Kalamaras’s extraordinary imagination. —Jeff Gundy, author of Wind Farm: Landscape with Stories and Towers
George Kalamaras is the consummate poet of reverence. The Rain That Doesn’t Reach the Ground is his most directly personal collection to date. Kalamaras deftly immerses us in a range of places, seasons, and times, revealing that we are part of something mysterious, beautiful, and threatening. These poems range from elation, “The moon’s sorrow nearly topples you with joy,” to lamentation, “How long can our bodies hang on / to the desire to hold the moon in our throat?” A whisper of autumnal feeling imbues these sturdy trusting prayers that dig deeply into the earth, the sky, the imagination, the bones of the body. Kalamaras honors the art of poetry, elevating our oneness with all beings, human and animal, alive now and before in the world. —Sheila E. Murphy, author of Permission to Relax
Excerpt
Throwing Salt at My Mother
She came again last night—
two, three dreams a week since she left
the body seven years ago.
My wife and I were hauling the Indiana oak
beneath which we’d gotten married, lugging it
with us all the way to Colorado, planting it here
on our mountain. And my mother
praised us, recalling for me an old photo
of her and me beneath that tree when I was five,
maybe six, the jeans I was meant to grow into
rolled at the cuffs, knees worn
from playing marbles. The sky was piercingly blue
and tornado-green at the same time—shifting,
it seemed, whenever I glanced at the slash pile
at the edge of the woods where we were told
to avoid the snakes. The hounds were restless,
a gangly blue-speckled pup running into my arms,
whining and whimpering for me to adopt it.
Dark across my heart, I knew the world could not
keep going on. That my breath would one day
cease. I had inconceivably reached
my sixty-ninth year. And all the hours of weeping,
of feeling less than whole, stood like stone
figures at the opening of a tomb. Fog
like talus caves settling. Woodsmoke
clouding my mouth. And still, I wanted to live.
And my mother wanted me to have that tree,
leaning into me, saying, Bring it inside near the willow,
honey, already growing in your chest. And all I knew
was how little I knew. How the crowded years
of the leafy growth of my brain
had brought me only a bit of shade, a slip
of shelter from the rain. Somehow, there were piles of salt
at the base of the tree, stacked like tiny Shinto temples,
circling it. I reached for them and began
throwing handfuls at my mother, saying,
I therefore commit your body to this tree.
Leaf to leaf, branch to branch.
We come from salt, and to salt we return.
It made so little sense, but I knew she needed
to absorb the salt, absorb whatever I threw at her.
That she was my mother drawing me back in.
That I would give birth to her
always, night after night
in my sleep.
(Note: This poem originally appeared in AGNI Online, 2024.)
Author
George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014–2016), is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years. He is the author of twenty-six collections of poetry—seventeen full-length books and nine chapbooks. He has also published a critical study on Western language theory and the Eastern wisdom traditions, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence (State University of New York Press, 1994). He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, the most recent of which is the 2024 Indiana Book Award for Poetry for his 2023 book from Dos Madres Press, To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me. George and his wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, have nurtured beagles in their home for thirty years, first Barney, then Bootsie, and now Blaisie. George, Mary Ann, and Blaisie have been dividing their time between Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Livermore, Colorado, in the mountains northwest of Fort Collins. They have recently completed a move and are now living full-time in Livermore, Colorado.
