What do you think?
Rate this book
Saunter: Poems
Joshua McKinney's debut collection of poetry, Saunter , shows immense devotion to and passion for language in all its aspects. He intensely attends to words and delights in the play of accidental connections and complications. Such amusement and playfulness with oppositions is evidenced in lines "an opening / a cello scales / some stairs. Risen, / a thought falls." McKinney's awareness of the complex resonance of literary history and current issues of language comes through in his dedication to making the appearance of language, not just its sound or its relative meaning, an integral aspect of his poems. Meanwhile, the subject matter is often surprisingly mythic and mysterious, championing absolute freedom and wildness. His intricate verse is sincere in its observations while turning inward on itself, sauntering in designed indirection.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2001
1 person is currently reading
8 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 29, 2021
This is the debut collection of poetry by Sacramento State teacher Joshua McKinney, put out by the University of Georgia Press in 2002.
This is a biased review. Dr. McKinney is a poetry professor from whom I have taken multiple classes. I’m a fan. I was a fan of his teaching going into my readings of his poetry, so it affected my perspective. I say this as if there is a way to write an un-biased review, which there is not. I say this as if writing a review is not already subjective, which it is. Whatever. I’m trying to be transparent.
I will admit that I wasn’t really “getting it” for the first seven poems of this collection. Then “Horizon” hit me:
Still at a distance,
clouds in columns
measure other than
days. They appear
musically as one
avoids broken
glass, the odd-
numbered problems,
love’s assignment.
Each of the fifteen poems in the first section, “Saunter”, shares a structure. Nine lines (like those above), a space break, and then a second stanza of another nine lines. As far as I know this is a nonce stanza of McKinney’s own creation here. It’s his own voice to this section, connecting poems of seemingly disparate subjects. This title section was originally published as a chapbook all on its own by Primitive Publications in 1998.
There is an epigraph quoting Henry David Thoreau preceding the “Saunter” section of Saunter:
“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.”
* * *
So, the “Horizon” hit me with its description of clouds, and then I was fully digging the book. Soon, my copy was littered with sticky-notes jutting out the side, the thin kind I use to mark particular poems, particular lines—the ½ inch by 1 ¾ inch ones aptly called Page Markers, Signets, or Registros de página.
In the poem “Saunter”:
Obedient, I advanced
in attention
I moved no closer.
* * *
In “Traces”:
. . . Nostalgia
left yesterday with its accordion.
* * *
In “The Elms”:
Air: the corporeal part of trends.
* * *
The hard-hitting villanelle that is “No Oasis”.
* * *
The final line of “ ‘Explosion in a Shingle Mill’ ”:
Our acts our angels are.
* * *
In her review of Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets, Viola Weinberg (Sacramento Poet Laureate 2000-2002) asks “Could there be a ‘Sacramento sensibility’ in poetry? A voice that exceeds the city and county limits?” She says yes, and I agree. Weinberg goes on to say that “The voice of Sacramento poets, earthy, ethereal, angry, loving, metered and free, is at home in the world, rambling with the best of them, dancing with boots on, in high, teetering heels, or no shoes at all. You will soon find yourself a part of the poem made by Sacramento poets—a range of light, made of a valet of words and delta waters, lies before you.”
In Saunter, McKinney exemplifies the earthiness. He exemplifies appreciation for the poetic history of meter and bravery for breaking free, or, perhaps, recognizing and coming to terms with a freedom that is already there. Take these lines from “The Law” for example:
All day the ordinary occurs
without witness. We sleep
in the glow of such freedom, thought
previously miraculous. Catastrophe has driven
the dream of two-legged Happiness out
into the jungle without applause.
Bob Stanley (Sacramento Poet Laureate 2009-2012 and editor of Late Peaches) wrote a poem about walking, called “Write Backwards”:
We walk to the end of the street, noticing—the neighbor
who has the “for sale” sign out front—her husband
passed away—twisting oak with the lanterns hung in
high branches. How did they get up there? We’ve walked
this random walk, a few times a week, for twenty years.
Past hundreds of trees, the first buds of spring, I’ve
always loved the way California spring arrives early—
February’s flowering pear, plum, quince, magnolia
bursting out through intermittent days of sun and rain—
and daffodils, too, confused, crying—It’s winter—What
planet are we on?—while dogwood and azalea wait in the
wings for real spring. Rain fills the slough, maybe
crayfish this year, and ’possums for sure. We don’t walk at
night as much as before—so many skunks—but squirrels
are everywhere—as busy now as they were in November
—branches dancing with leaps and landings.
Now that I’m at the end of the walk I begin at
the end—twenty years in a neighborhood while our kids
have come and gone, you and I holding hands sometimes
as we talk. We talk about work—yours and mine—
mostly about people, tiny success and failures that spin
by in a conference call, a fifty-minute class. We talk
about friends too, and family, what’s behind, what’s
ahead, and it’s just talk, it goes away when we’re done,
and then we go sit down at separate screens and work
some more.
But writing is different from walking. The walk
goes forward, but the writing, by its nature, moves in
reverse. There is no way I can chronologically—or
logically—recreate the walk—cold air bracing after the
rain sweeps east, leaving no moisture in its wake. Even as
slough and street fill with water, I cannot render the slosh
of our boots and the circle-spray of truck tires as we
swing wide to let them roar by. But I try—I go to the end
and write backwards—not only back through the walk
but through thoughts that spilled out as we talked. I go
back for the right words for what we saw—was it live
oak, cork oak, or valley oak with its long lobed lobata
leaves? Was there a blue oak, an oracle oak, each one
only a name, a story within a story that’s told somewhere
else? Every word, every story leads out. I go back
through the walk and through the years and remember
the house—long torn down—where the man lived alone
with his rabbits. Lost in his world, swimming pool filled
with mud, his family was his rabbits—he gave our kids a
rabbit, too—that was a chapter we didn’t expect. Each
house, each inhabitant spins a thread. A deep tangle of
pines hid the house at the corner, before they tore it all
down—the house and the pines, before the big place got
built—the one we call the bank. And money comes into
it, and the children that ran ahead of us, or behind, and
families come and gone, and richer or poorer, yes, and
sickness and health, and our walk changes. We walk
faster or slower, but we always go forward, so we need to
write backwards.
—from Miracle Shine, CW Books (2013)
The Sacramento sensibility has to do with our land (all of ours): with walking it forward and with writing it backwards.
After reading Stanley’s poem, we have to say that he knows how to saunter. How could we possibly read that poem and pretend that the writer does not understand the art of Walking? After walking the holy-land forward, Stanley sits down to write a non-chronological, non-logical poem about the walk. He must write in reverse. He opens his Bag of Names, trying to remember: “was it live oak, cork oak, or valley oak with its long lobed lobata leaves? Was there a blue oak, an oracle oak, each one only a name, a story within a story that’s told somewhere else?” In this context, let’s go back and re-read McKinney’s “The Law”, this time from the beginning:
Flatness knows the immediacy of shape:
eyes in the dark geometric movement,
teeth and claws blooming
beneath the tongue’s tendrils.
We empty the Bag of Names
before us, its pitiful pile
exhausted with choices.
Throw river into a river and it floats away.
All day the ordinary occurs
without witness. We sleep
in the glow of such freedom, thought
previously miraculous. Catastrophe has driven
the dream of two-legged Happiness out
into the jungle without applause.
* * *
The Sacramento sensibility wakes us up, to witness the ordinary, to praise it as best we can as we pull pitifully, almost pointlessly, from the Bag of Names.
This is a biased review. Dr. McKinney is a poetry professor from whom I have taken multiple classes. I’m a fan. I was a fan of his teaching going into my readings of his poetry, so it affected my perspective. I say this as if there is a way to write an un-biased review, which there is not. I say this as if writing a review is not already subjective, which it is. Whatever. I’m trying to be transparent.
I will admit that I wasn’t really “getting it” for the first seven poems of this collection. Then “Horizon” hit me:
Still at a distance,
clouds in columns
measure other than
days. They appear
musically as one
avoids broken
glass, the odd-
numbered problems,
love’s assignment.
Each of the fifteen poems in the first section, “Saunter”, shares a structure. Nine lines (like those above), a space break, and then a second stanza of another nine lines. As far as I know this is a nonce stanza of McKinney’s own creation here. It’s his own voice to this section, connecting poems of seemingly disparate subjects. This title section was originally published as a chapbook all on its own by Primitive Publications in 1998.
There is an epigraph quoting Henry David Thoreau preceding the “Saunter” section of Saunter:
“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.”
* * *
So, the “Horizon” hit me with its description of clouds, and then I was fully digging the book. Soon, my copy was littered with sticky-notes jutting out the side, the thin kind I use to mark particular poems, particular lines—the ½ inch by 1 ¾ inch ones aptly called Page Markers, Signets, or Registros de página.
In the poem “Saunter”:
Obedient, I advanced
in attention
I moved no closer.
* * *
In “Traces”:
. . . Nostalgia
left yesterday with its accordion.
* * *
In “The Elms”:
Air: the corporeal part of trends.
* * *
The hard-hitting villanelle that is “No Oasis”.
* * *
The final line of “ ‘Explosion in a Shingle Mill’ ”:
Our acts our angels are.
* * *
In her review of Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets, Viola Weinberg (Sacramento Poet Laureate 2000-2002) asks “Could there be a ‘Sacramento sensibility’ in poetry? A voice that exceeds the city and county limits?” She says yes, and I agree. Weinberg goes on to say that “The voice of Sacramento poets, earthy, ethereal, angry, loving, metered and free, is at home in the world, rambling with the best of them, dancing with boots on, in high, teetering heels, or no shoes at all. You will soon find yourself a part of the poem made by Sacramento poets—a range of light, made of a valet of words and delta waters, lies before you.”
In Saunter, McKinney exemplifies the earthiness. He exemplifies appreciation for the poetic history of meter and bravery for breaking free, or, perhaps, recognizing and coming to terms with a freedom that is already there. Take these lines from “The Law” for example:
All day the ordinary occurs
without witness. We sleep
in the glow of such freedom, thought
previously miraculous. Catastrophe has driven
the dream of two-legged Happiness out
into the jungle without applause.
Bob Stanley (Sacramento Poet Laureate 2009-2012 and editor of Late Peaches) wrote a poem about walking, called “Write Backwards”:
We walk to the end of the street, noticing—the neighbor
who has the “for sale” sign out front—her husband
passed away—twisting oak with the lanterns hung in
high branches. How did they get up there? We’ve walked
this random walk, a few times a week, for twenty years.
Past hundreds of trees, the first buds of spring, I’ve
always loved the way California spring arrives early—
February’s flowering pear, plum, quince, magnolia
bursting out through intermittent days of sun and rain—
and daffodils, too, confused, crying—It’s winter—What
planet are we on?—while dogwood and azalea wait in the
wings for real spring. Rain fills the slough, maybe
crayfish this year, and ’possums for sure. We don’t walk at
night as much as before—so many skunks—but squirrels
are everywhere—as busy now as they were in November
—branches dancing with leaps and landings.
Now that I’m at the end of the walk I begin at
the end—twenty years in a neighborhood while our kids
have come and gone, you and I holding hands sometimes
as we talk. We talk about work—yours and mine—
mostly about people, tiny success and failures that spin
by in a conference call, a fifty-minute class. We talk
about friends too, and family, what’s behind, what’s
ahead, and it’s just talk, it goes away when we’re done,
and then we go sit down at separate screens and work
some more.
But writing is different from walking. The walk
goes forward, but the writing, by its nature, moves in
reverse. There is no way I can chronologically—or
logically—recreate the walk—cold air bracing after the
rain sweeps east, leaving no moisture in its wake. Even as
slough and street fill with water, I cannot render the slosh
of our boots and the circle-spray of truck tires as we
swing wide to let them roar by. But I try—I go to the end
and write backwards—not only back through the walk
but through thoughts that spilled out as we talked. I go
back for the right words for what we saw—was it live
oak, cork oak, or valley oak with its long lobed lobata
leaves? Was there a blue oak, an oracle oak, each one
only a name, a story within a story that’s told somewhere
else? Every word, every story leads out. I go back
through the walk and through the years and remember
the house—long torn down—where the man lived alone
with his rabbits. Lost in his world, swimming pool filled
with mud, his family was his rabbits—he gave our kids a
rabbit, too—that was a chapter we didn’t expect. Each
house, each inhabitant spins a thread. A deep tangle of
pines hid the house at the corner, before they tore it all
down—the house and the pines, before the big place got
built—the one we call the bank. And money comes into
it, and the children that ran ahead of us, or behind, and
families come and gone, and richer or poorer, yes, and
sickness and health, and our walk changes. We walk
faster or slower, but we always go forward, so we need to
write backwards.
—from Miracle Shine, CW Books (2013)
The Sacramento sensibility has to do with our land (all of ours): with walking it forward and with writing it backwards.
After reading Stanley’s poem, we have to say that he knows how to saunter. How could we possibly read that poem and pretend that the writer does not understand the art of Walking? After walking the holy-land forward, Stanley sits down to write a non-chronological, non-logical poem about the walk. He must write in reverse. He opens his Bag of Names, trying to remember: “was it live oak, cork oak, or valley oak with its long lobed lobata leaves? Was there a blue oak, an oracle oak, each one only a name, a story within a story that’s told somewhere else?” In this context, let’s go back and re-read McKinney’s “The Law”, this time from the beginning:
Flatness knows the immediacy of shape:
eyes in the dark geometric movement,
teeth and claws blooming
beneath the tongue’s tendrils.
We empty the Bag of Names
before us, its pitiful pile
exhausted with choices.
Throw river into a river and it floats away.
All day the ordinary occurs
without witness. We sleep
in the glow of such freedom, thought
previously miraculous. Catastrophe has driven
the dream of two-legged Happiness out
into the jungle without applause.
* * *
The Sacramento sensibility wakes us up, to witness the ordinary, to praise it as best we can as we pull pitifully, almost pointlessly, from the Bag of Names.
April 11, 2020
This is something about a poet on the threshold of experimental language poetry and zen-like reflections on nature. Mckinney has a gift for elliptical visions and fragments that tell more collected together than alone. His awareness of the limitations of language and the way absence is as important as presence makes this collection stand out. When Mckinney warns us that "Disapair faults every beautiful monster," his omissions and silences are clearly intended as antidotes for that.
December 16, 2023
I’m biased because he was my professor and a wonderful friend. But, like always, I love McKinney’s poetry. I was first introduced to his poetry through new poems he would present in our class at the beginning of 2020. So, it was really nice to go back to the beginning with his work and see where he started and how much his writing has grown. I will always recommend my favorite poet to everyone!!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews