Brief Summer in the Hinterland

Collected Poems

by Richard Andrew Hanson

Brief Summer in the Hinterland
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Brief Summer in the Hinterland

Collected Poems

by Richard Andrew Hanson

Published May 21, 2013
95 Pages
Genre: POETRY / American / General



 

Book Details

If the hinterland without is finally and irrevocably destroyed, so accordingly must the hinterland within the human spirit wither and die.


Relentlessly, it seems, we examine and re-examine ourselves and our complex relationships to one another and the ongoing dramas of our lives, while forgetting the context in which all relationships take place. It’s the buzz—whatever beeps or flickers insistently enough—that claims our attention. And we unwittingly evolve to become what we most attend. How easy it is to believe ourselves distinct and apart from our tidy notions of “environment” and “natural world.” Yet we cannot insist upon this separation without damaging consequences like those that now, equally insistently, threaten us. When we remove ourselves from the buzz, it becomes clear that we are of the environment, not outside it. The environment is in us, as we are in it. The hinterlands exist as those back countries that stubbornly stand sentinel around, above, and below us. When our thin veneers of habit and culture are stripped away, there remains the elemental. The rhythms, the solitude, the vast mental and emotional spaces graciously bestowed by the oceans and forests are fixed firmly upon our being. Not surprisingly, the poems in this collection, though they often feature the timeless complexities of human relationships, invariably play out against the firm backdrop of full context, of place—the hinterlands.

 

Book Excerpt

We'd lived just around the corner from Sylvia, buried back in the shrouds of our long ago. My young ears had heard that before, as a small girl, Sylvia rode horses and was very, very smart and became (only whispered) famous in some odd way. She, a very local mystery from a family only mentioned sotto voce, furtive words I did not know, but then I later learned, my big sister had heard the myth and had read the words and had wondered through those years what web this older girl had spun; how she was called and where and how it had all begun. (From "A Certain Sylvia")

 

About the Author

Richard Andrew Hanson

Richard Andrew Hanson’s Hinterland poems are drawn from nearly five decades, and are deeply influenced by the towering Pacific forests, the splendors of the nearby ocean, and the ceaseless, changing rhythms of the seasons. Hanson is a retired carpenter and woodworker, a one-time journalism school refugee and longtime fixture in Oregon’s Coast Range.