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It is a long bridge. Sunlight scatters down through the cedar shakes and the rough-hewn beams. Above each entrance, the leaves of the cottonwood catch and turn in the wind. Below, the river drifts past the limestone
piers.
Since Jared Carter's poetry collection, Work, for the Night is Coming, won the
1980 Walt Whitman Award, he has been recognized as one of the nation's
major poets. Cross This Bridge at a Walk is his fourth collection of poems. He continues to tell us about a place called Mississinewa County. His poems reach out to the stories, myths, and recollections of an entire continent.
Cross this Bridge at a Walk is the winner
of the Indiana Best Poetry Book of 2006 Award presented by the Indiana
Center for the Book.
More about Jared Carter at http://jaredcarter.com/home/
Go with Jared Carter into the secret places of the earth ---
Excerpt
from the book ---
To go, if there is time, to look at what
the land holds -- some feature of their world
they wish to share, whether it be host
or stranger who comes up after the reading
and says "If you’ve time tomorrow morning,
there’s something that might interest you."
I find a way to meet them, to go see.
Every place has its secrets, its holes
and entryways into the earth, its shafts
abandoned and still burning underground,
its desert reaches: natural bridges spaced
through an entrenched meander; salt marsh
and bayou darkened by canvasback rising;
ridges stripped and gashed and left barren.
Always they want to visit wild places:
sail the catamaran across to Michigan’s
archipelago, so far out the curvature
of earth hides everything but water and sky;
canoe down a spring-fed river in the Ozarks
through long tunnels of sycamores arching
smooth and white above their own reflections.
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