Approaching Winter: Poems

by Floyd Skloot

Floyd Skloot's eighth poetry collection, Approaching Winter, evokes the fluid and dynamic nature of memory as it ebbs and floods through our daily lives. Here the real and the imagined intermingle freely: In one poem, the cry of eagles reflects the wails of an infant daughter, long since grown and gone; in another, an aging Samuel Beckett prepares to throw the first pitch at Ebbets Field.

Traveling from Portland's Willamette River, which borders Skloot's home, to the hushed landscapes of the afterlife, the poems in this collection acknowledge the passage of time and the inevitable darkness that lies ahead. Yet Skloot also remains attuned to the urgency of the present moment, as he admires the plumage of the local birds in the short days before their journey south for the winter. By turns whimsical and meditative, Approaching Winter gives voice to the struggle to find coherence in a fragmented world.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, ebook

First published October 5, 2015

About the author

Floyd was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1947, and moved to Long Beach, NY, ten years later. He graduated from Franklin & Marshall College with a B.A. in English, and completed an M.A. in English at Southern Illinois University, where he studied with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. From 1972 until becoming disabled by viral-borne brain damage in 1988, Floyd worked in the field of public policy in Illinois, Washington, and Oregon. He began publishing poetry in 1970, fiction in 1975, and essays in 1990. His work has appeared in many major literary journals in the US and abroad. His seventeen books have won wide acclaim and numerous awards, and are included in many high school and college curricula. In May, 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin & Marshall College.


An Oregonian since 1984, Floyd moved from Portland to rural Amity when he married Beverly Hallberg in 1993. They lived in a cedar yurt in the middle of twenty hilly acres of woods for 13 years before moving back to Portland.


Floyd's daughter, the nonfiction writer Rebecca Skloot, lives in Memphis, TN, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis and works as a freelance writer. Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was published by Crown Books in February, 2010 and became an immediate NY Times and Indie Bound bestseller. Her work has been included in the Best Creative Nonfiction, Best Food Writing and Women’s Best Friend anthologies as well as appearing regularly in the New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, O: Oprah’s Magazine and elsewhere. Her boyfriend, writer and actor David Prete, author of Say That to My Face (Norton, 2003), recently completed his second book of fiction and teaches writers how to improve their public reading skills. Floyd's stepson, Matthew Coale, lives with his wife and two children in Vancouver, Washington.


Floyd's current projects include new poems and essays that are slowly shaping into a new book.

Reviews

[Susan Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Floyd Skloot: Oregon Old Growth Poetry Giant
Susan Kay Anderson

Portland Poet Floyd Skloot read poems from Approaching Winter, his latest poetry publication and one poem about his teacher, Thomas Kinsella, from Close Reading, another recent book. Skloot joins a now-growing group of poets who, in the past fifteen years, have painstakingly recovered from a traumatic brain injury and/or debilitating illness and have learned to literally walk and talk again: Tom Clark, Linda Hogan, and Peggy Shumaker, to name a few. Skloot’s new lease on life, as they say, holds precious insight, laughter, and a uniquely gifted tenderness displayed by the aforementioned club to which he now (I think proudly) belongs.

I seem to remember poet Floyd Skloot as having a long rustic beard, wearing jeans, granny glasses, and hip pointy leather boots. The poet I heard read in Eugene from his new collection is dynamic, vulnerable, and excellent. He is handsomely rugged/clean-shaven with sparkling blue eyes which speak of cherishing each and every moment alive. Skloot is a gigantically accomplished poet with accolades and publications to his name and also extremely proud of his daughter Rebecca’s writing success and of his wife Beverly’s own artistic accomplishments. He is the father and husband everyone would want because of his gentleness, his humor, and his humble gratitude which are evident in his poetry and in his demeanor. He is not up for grabs, but his poetry definitely is. I was lucky to hear him read and hear him speak about his work and his life and about what he cherishes: his childhood, his family, his teacher Thomas Kinsella, the Willamette River, and “artists, painters, poets, and writers at the moment of crisis.” He did not mind entertaining the crowd gathered to hear him and at times sang, used an Irish accent, and even became teary-eyed remembering his friend and his brother in poems about each.

Skloot waits for magical moments then reports them in his poems.

The reading, held at the “Duck Store” (garishly lit up with lots of green and yellow decoration due to the University of Oregon’s accomplishments in football in recent years, aka, the U. of O. Bookstore) in Eugene on October 22, 2015, was attended by another Northwest poetry giant, John Witte, with whom I became acquainted before Skloot’s reading, having recognized him from the cover of Disquiet, which we studied for Christopher Howell’s (yet another towering fir in the Northwest’s Poetry Grove) summer poetry workshop at Eastern Oregon University’s M.F.A. in Writing Program, of which I am currently a student. Witte didn’t mind posing for a selfie with me, and although he was blushing (hey, I asked him first, just to make sure) he sacrificed the moment to my tiny camera in a good-natured way while filling me in on questions remaining in my mind regarding Disquiet. I found out that the poems had been described as cells by someone and my perceptions of them being round and alive were not entirely off-track (see my review of Disquiet elsewhere in the E.O.U. blogosphere). Our chat was cut short (much to Witte’s relief, no doubt) by wonderful bookseller and event coordinator, Laura White, introducing Skloot’s reading, as “learning about the author’s hidden dimensions of consciousness” and not a moment too soon: Witte was spared any more name-dropping and pandering and could therefore enjoy his friend’s reading without my further fawning away.

Skloot opened the reading with a poem dedicated to his wife, Beverly, called, “Ahihi Bay,” about watching her swim at the beach on Maui. He said he wasn’t a waterman, despite living on the shores of the Willamette River in Portland and having grown up on an island (Brooklyn and the Jersey shoreline) and was content to just watch his wife snorkel. “Ahihi Bay” could be the title of a whole book of Skloot’s, it is a poem which laps at your ankles and scrubs the bottoms of your feet in a way that most poems set in Hawaii fail to do. Here is a wonderful part of that poem:

“…She sinks
into the surf and drifts above antler
coral and long-spined urchins where a green
sea turtle swam beside her yesterday.”

Skloot gives his wife over to the bay, so to speak; this poem gently supports and loves her, just as he would, “…turning her almost/imperceptibly…” We can see this as we stand where Skloot stands, on the beach, watching, and perhaps healing and recovering.

Skloot describes the first part of Approaching Winter as coming “from my childhood” and said that his father was the world’s worst movie maker, “chaos, with multiple scenes layered on top of each other.” In the poem, “The Movie Maker,” the poet finds a film that is, “…my last chance to see as he did.” Because of the search to know his father or poems which address this relationship, Skloot could be said to also be a poet who accomplishes what the Beat-era poets set out to do in their vast wanderings: get a glimpse of their absent/disappeared/disappearing fathers and move towards an understanding of them, of finding them. His poems also speak of “what someone thought and what it is now.” Specifically, the poems Skloot read from Approaching Winter and Close Reading, range in topic from a mad search for replacing a lost pink barrette for his daughter while traveling through desolate parts of the west, the deaths of his father and brother, to his grandfather’s clique of “altekakers” (Yiddish for “old farts” who “had retired from everything but complaining”) and a tribute to his teacher while all being tributes to his teacher.

Skloot lived in Brooklyn “until the Dodgers moved from there, so I moved from there—in 1957.” The “first grown-up book” he read was Heyerdahl’s Kon-tiki. He describes his childhood as very much of the 1950’s, summing it up with, “all you had to do was dream,” and where, “teachers ate lunches in a secret room.” His poem, “Dream of a Childhood” lists vivid details such as “Parisian blue,” and “Old Gold cigarettes” embedded in the landscape of fear, arms build-up, and the real and imagined sterility of the Cold War.

Growing up, Skloot played a lot of sports. He was on the track team and his best friend, John Frank, was also on the track team. They spent one summer perfecting a hammer throw and running in sand. Skloot laments this friend and says it is hard to make it through reading the poem dedicated to him, “The Hammer Throw.” It seems that Skloot’s endurance training facilitated his success in finding a mentor in Thomas Kinsella, his teacher at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, in the late 1960s. Skloot was an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and looked through anthologies and found a poem by Kinsella and searched for him. He found him, landed a teaching assistantship though his application, and showed up “at his door” enrolled in an Irish literature course. Skloot then asked when he could start studying poetry. Kinsella “had no idea what he was asking” and said, “If you can find three other people we’ll do close reading, but that’s it.” Skloot seemed to allude to the fact that his and Kinsella’s take on “close reading” was more like a close poetic associate exploration of poetry instead of the exact opposite of the idiotic drivel stressed in today’s mandated public school curriculum, also called “close reading” but is actually more like a close call with being bored by deconstruction overkill (my words).

When Skloot was ill, he remembered his old teacher’s words (Kinsella regarded in Ireland to be the greatest Irish poet since Yeats) and said that when he got sick, “his example was there for me—his example and his will to find a way to write what I needed to write.” Skloot had witnessed his old teacher and his “dedication and immersion and total belief in himself and his work.” This inspired Skloot to send his work to Northwest Review, where he knew editor John Witte “a brilliant reader and dead honest” would give him critical feedback. Instead, it was promptly accepted, giving Skloot the hope he needed to get on with recovery.

The cover of Approaching Winter is of the Willamette River, Skloot revealed, “of the view right down the block” where Skloot lives, in Portland. He says the book is a love poem to the Willamette River and to his wife. The poem, “Homespun” will be included in the next “American Life” column series editied by Ted Kooser (forthcoming in January, 2016). Skloot’s poem, “Returning Home,” reprinted on Poetry Daily, on October 24, 2015.

I have never looked so forward to winter, or to winter’s approach, as I am now that I bought Floyd Skloot’s book to take home and read.