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Country of Light
Joseph Stroud was all but unknown when, in 1998, Below Cold Mountain appeared. As reviewers took note of this gorgeous book by a reclusive poet, Stroud’s poems found a larger Garrison Keillor read them on NPR and his poems were reprinted in The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post . The sentiment shared by readers and booksellers was one of discovery. In Joseph Stroud’s new book, his poetic imagination infuses landscapes, hard travel, and commonplace objects. Whether trekking through Mexico or Vietnam, living in the High Sierras, or “painting paradise” in the voice of Renaissance painter Giotto, Stroud’s lyrics, prose poems, elegies, and odes articulate a journey of uncommon attention and startling perception. Joseph Stroud lives near Santa Cruz, California.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 28, 2020
"Three days into the journey
I lost the Inca Trail
and scrambled around the Andes
in a growing panic
when on a hillside below snowline
I met a farmer who pointed the way—
Machu Picchu allá, he said.
He knew where I wanted to go.
From my pack I pulled out an orange.
It seemed to catch fire
in that high blue Andean sky.
I gave it to him.
He had been digging in a garden,
turning up clumps of earth,
some odd, misshapen nuggets,
some potatoes.
He handed me one,
a potato the size of the orange
looking as if it had been in the ground
a hundred years,
a potato I carried with me
until at last I stood gazing down
on the Urubamba valley,
peaks rising out of the jungle into clouds,
and there among the mists
was the Temple of the Sun
and the Lost City of the Incas.
Looking back now, all these years later,
what I remember most,
what matters to me most,
was that farmer, alone on his hillside,
who gave me a potato,
a potato with its peasant face,
its lumps and lunar craters,
a potato that fit perfectly in my hand,
a potato that consoled me as I walked,
told me not to fear,
held me close to the earth,
the potato I put in a pot that night,
the potato I boiled above Machu Picchu,
the patient, gnarled potato
I ate."
-- "The Potato"
I lost the Inca Trail
and scrambled around the Andes
in a growing panic
when on a hillside below snowline
I met a farmer who pointed the way—
Machu Picchu allá, he said.
He knew where I wanted to go.
From my pack I pulled out an orange.
It seemed to catch fire
in that high blue Andean sky.
I gave it to him.
He had been digging in a garden,
turning up clumps of earth,
some odd, misshapen nuggets,
some potatoes.
He handed me one,
a potato the size of the orange
looking as if it had been in the ground
a hundred years,
a potato I carried with me
until at last I stood gazing down
on the Urubamba valley,
peaks rising out of the jungle into clouds,
and there among the mists
was the Temple of the Sun
and the Lost City of the Incas.
Looking back now, all these years later,
what I remember most,
what matters to me most,
was that farmer, alone on his hillside,
who gave me a potato,
a potato with its peasant face,
its lumps and lunar craters,
a potato that fit perfectly in my hand,
a potato that consoled me as I walked,
told me not to fear,
held me close to the earth,
the potato I put in a pot that night,
the potato I boiled above Machu Picchu,
the patient, gnarled potato
I ate."
-- "The Potato"
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March 1, 2013811.54 S9254c 2004
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews