By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Jeff Fearnside’s new book, his first full collection of poetry, is a love story as travelogue.
The collection opens with the title poem set in the bazaar in Kazakhstan. The poetic details of sights, sounds, tastes, and history together drops the reader in the middle of the kaleidoscopic muddle..
Fearnside served in the Peace Corps in the former Soviet republic and later worked for a nonprofit there and elsewhere in Central Asia.
Fearnside has revisited that period of his life in both journalistic essays and short stories. Now with “Lake: Love Poems’ he dives deeply into his most intimate connection to Kazakhstan — he met and married his wife, Valentina, there.
The collection takes their romance from her native land to his native country though in a section of the United States that’s far removed from Northwest Ohio where he grew up and began his journey as a writer. Fearnside is a graduate of Bowling Green High School and the creative writing program at Bowling Green State University. Thirteen years ago, Fearnside and his wife have put down roots in the state of Oregon where both work at Oregon State University. He also teaches in the low-residency writing program housed at OSU’s Cascade campus.
Though their relationship is at the center of the book, these are not love poems as many think of them. “These are not sentimental, gushy stuff,” Fearnside said in a recent telephone interview. “It’s just not my nature to write it that way.” Instead of platitudes this love story is rooted in intimate detail.
Their love story sprawls from a shrinking inland sea to the lush shore and forests of Oregon. Fearnside ties this together with a keen eye for history, landscape and society. He paints details of the post-Soviet world including he and Valentina’s first apartment.
Food binds relationships, both close and communal, or later on the Oregon shore, the web of marine life. The landscape bears the marks both of recent history and prehistory. In Kazakhstan, it was the Silk Road, the passage for merchandise and culture from Asia into Europe. In the United States, it is the enduring mark of indigenous peoples. In the poem “Marys Peak-Tcha Teemanwi,” Fearnside savors the native names of streams that rush to the river, and then to the sea.
“Lake: Love Poems” is structured into two parts, each with three sections. Fearnside said they weren’t created with this in mind. It was only in the editing, when he discovere the threads among the poems, written over two decades, that the structure took shape. “When I began looking at the poems I had, I realized, oh, these are really love poems. That’s when I understood that this was about my relationship with my wife. And I came to understand, this book is a memoir in poems.”
He praised the work of Ross Tangedal, director and publisher of Cornerstone Press, and his team. “At every stage of the publishing process, they’ve been terrific in every way.”
The central poem “The Love Song of Central Asia” was conceived 20 years ago, but he’s returned to it periodically since. But it wasn’t until “Lake” was hearing its final form that he realized he needed to finish the poem.
“I came back to that poem and it was in this rough stage and I looked at it. I’m like, that’s what I need. I just understood that it had to go there.” The breathless narrative is redolent of descriptions, especially of food “that nourishes, / body, and memory.”
“The Love Song” is a structural hinge for the book. The poem and book turn on the lines: “Then we met, you and I, my Valushka, / two strangers born literally half / a world apart.”
Fearnside said: “I’m writing the poems for her and at the same time also for an audience, and I suppose, I’m aware of that, but at the end of the day, I’m hoping just to be honest. I hope that in doing so, it’ll resonate with her and it’ll resonate with other people.”
Fearnside added: “She’s very supportive. She really likes the poems and she’s really happy to have the book dedicated to her, which makes me happy.”
While the poems defy common expectations of love poems, they also defy the modernist aversion to speaking of love because it has been co-opted by advertising and commercial culture. “This is a love poem” he declares unapologetically in one poem.
The book moves from free-flowing open lines to more structured works. “Oregon,” the second half of the book, starts with a series of somonka, a Japanese conversational form that entails two stanzas, each in a different voice, answering the other. Fearnside gives voice to natural elements. In one, the creek complains the rushing water seems to be rushing away. The channel replies: “I and my lovely banks / remain together always.”
Each somonka has an amorous undertow.
The focus on nature reflects the couple’s love of outdoor activities and exploring the natural wonders of Oregon.
These form a poetic guidebook to the landscape going beyond the physical to the historical and spiritual.
“The Sound” in the title of one poem is that of the ocean on the shore. “(I)t is there,” Fearnside writes, “the closest thing to everlasting we know on earth.” Later he writes: “It is born of the ache between the earth’s / wobbling orbit and the pulling moon, / the call of one body to another.”
That last line connects the natural world to the tug of human love that’s at the heart of the poem “Lake.”
All is not serious. One humorous poem tells about getting separated while mushroom hunting, a bit of comic miscommunication many couples can relate to.
Fearnside later reflects on excursion on the couple’s 20th wedding anniversary. “While the lake would be astonishingly /blue without you, it wouldn’t be the same.”
