Quarry

I knew Peter Kilgore in Portland, Maine in the early ‘70s, when he was collaborating with Bruce Holsapple and David Empfield, co-editing Contraband magazine. But until the recent publication of Quarry, I was unaware of the extent and scope of Peter’s own work. Kudos to Bruce and to Dana Wilde for compiling and co-editing this comprehensive collection, clearly a labor of love on their part, and to Michael Alpert for his elegant book design.

There are many ways to read this book — one of them is NOT fast. Start anywhere — read backwards, read forwards, skip around — but please, gentle reader, do . . . take . . . your . . . time. The power of Peter’s work lies in its ability to extract from a moment the right-now of its conjunction with the received world — to translate somehow from that stilled meeting place, its mystery, its power, and, to use a phrase Peter uses advisedly, its awe. I’m instructed again and again, reading these poems, of the power of that achieved stillness to invite the numinous. Beyond sheer witness, the poems arise from a place of beholding. An achievement, less Promethean — as in stealing fire from the gods — than regaining the immediacy of childhood. And calling on an earned wisdom, to translate into language the beheld.

I find myself reading Quarry as ripples in a stream of (American) haiku, demanding a stillness and attention commensurate with the poet’s. A meditative space, not so easy of access in our harried moment, nor any less so when Peter stilled himself into that location — his place of true receptivity and power:

I like to lie inside the western cusp watching seabirds ride the winds.
I draw strength here I have power.

Still laughing with crows I crest the northwest rim stop to gawk as
two hawks shot from rocks like puffs of dust in this gale wind. My
power! My joy! My place on earth!

And further:

this day’s
wine
is mine

rake of wind
earaches
of wind

i’ll be
this day’s
monk

“This day’s monk” — I’m struck by the exactness of that phrase, and how it captures a kind of almost monastic exile I feel throughout the work. The poet’s discomfort with the spiritual poverty of the daily grind — his deeply felt need to return (retreat?) into the vitality and solace of the natural world. So many poems attest to just that tidal pull, as in these lines, echoing, and pointedly inverting, the naked beseechings of 17th-century metaphysical poets such as John Donne (“Batter my heart, three-person’d God”) and George Herbert:

whip me
wind

lick me
dry

wet in
the arms

of Overset

i accept
ocean

as my
savior

Of course, knowing of Peter’s later descent into depression and his imponderable, self-inflicted end, there is always that felt undertow:

i have scanned
the charts
i too
carry
something
of the black
cargo in
my hold
gems and ashes
alone on
the sea
of any man’s
being

Gems and ashes. And in this vibrant collection the gems of Peter’s cargo survive the ashes of our common heritage. An authentic power resonates throughout these pages that revitalizes — brings us to. I’ll be revisiting Quarry often for that very jolt — maybe the wrong word for it, but something like a sandal to the head of the drifting acolyte — and we waken, come alive. I feel an undercurrent of sadness reading his words now, almost as testament, but beyond that, the privilege of accompanying a spirit so capable of opening himself to the sheer wonder of creation, and willing us the words for it. Thank you, Peter, for that gift.

— Jim Bishop