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A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country

by Daniel Bowman Jr. (Goodreads Author)

4.57 of 5 stars 4.57 · rating details · 7 ratings · 3 reviews

Scott Russell Sanders has written, “How could our hearts be large enough for heaven if they are not large enough for earth? The only paradise I know is the one lit by our everyday sun, this land of difficult love, shot through with shadow. The place where we learn this love, if we learn it at all, shimmers behind every new place we inhabit.”

In his first collection, Daniel...more

Paperback, 80 pages

Published January 16th 2012 by Virtual Artists Collective

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Mar 10, 2012 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

Bowman, Jr., Daniel. A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country. Virtual Artists Collective, 2012.

A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country is a hauntingly beautiful debut collection of poems by Daniel Bowman, Jr. The poet-speaker immediately invokes the spirit and the presence of Mohawk in the first poem titled “Poem for the Undead.” Consider: When “Mohawk comes . . . hidden like shadows / on back roads”—as secretive and as silent as the sudden footfalls of memory and mystery. Mohawk echoes and embodi...more Bowman, Jr., Daniel. A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country. Virtual Artists Collective, 2012.

A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country is a hauntingly beautiful debut collection of poems by Daniel Bowman, Jr. The poet-speaker immediately invokes the spirit and the presence of Mohawk in the first poem titled “Poem for the Undead.” Consider: When “Mohawk comes . . . hidden like shadows / on back roads”—as secretive and as silent as the sudden footfalls of memory and mystery. Mohawk echoes and embodies the relationship between memory and mystery. Mohawk is memory and mystery. “Poem for the Undead” weaves these thematic strands together: “Mohawk comes / like blackbirds at dawn, / weaves itself / into itself / like a twisted weeping willow, / face delicate, / curled as ivy, / Mohawk comes like / some small creature hit / and left for dead, / gray eyes fixed, / Mohawk bites the hills / like a river, / smokes like your kin” (3).

The names of personas and places in Bowman’s A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country are grounded locally in the ghosts of both the past and the present landscape and personality of the Mohawk River Valley. In the poem “Hammond’s Farm, Mohawk” the metaphoric rise of Mohawk’s spirit haunts each stanza. Consider: “By the salt pile the scarecrow dances. / As the right hand rises, / you might recall the breaking / of the cellar window. // Hammond taps the maple / by the ruins of his grandfather’s barn. / When the right hand rises, / he forgets to check the mail. // What scares me / is not ruin / but the absence of music and / the ways I ignore it” (4).

However, the persistent use of figurative language—for example, both similes and personification—and haunting, haiku-like imagery suggest that there is also universal harmony at work within the “twisted weeping” particulars of these poems. Consider the final stanza of “Hammond’s Farm, Mohawk”: “But the right hand rises / and the songs of our mothers / will once again pierce / the hard light shining in the kitchen” (4). Memory receives brief moments of poetic illumination within these old haunts, the childhood interplay between imagination and mystery.

The Bowman’s balanced stance, steady aim, and verbal targeting via the human faculties of memory and imagination still hold taut, stretched tight and true to that tension generated by the stringent flexibility of this ancient bow of mystery—right before the Native American arrow’s singing release. That is, the poet-speaker reveres, respects, and remembers the persons and places of his childhood, paying proper tribute to the possibilities and rites of ancestry: Bowman animates both his familial forebears as well as literary lineage through the local landscape.

And yet memory has assumed strange and new poetic forms and structures, poems of all shapes and sizes. Memory, oddly enough, has been transformed by imagination’s mysterious journey—the Bowman’s time-travels westward and eastbound and all around the global village.

I first encountered Daniel Bowman’s poems in our graduate creative writing workshop during the SPU MFA Whidbey residency. In point of fact and fondness, I remember earlier versions of some of the poems now nestled here. My favorite poems in A Plum Tree embody cool equanimity and weathered inclemency and freely range from the quotidian to the sublime: “Poem for the Undead,” “Hammond’s Farm, Mohawk,” “To a Famous Poet with a Bad Poem in a Famous Magazine,” “Diner, Midtown Manhattan,” “Walking through the Dream of a Stranger,” “December in Middle America,” “New York Winter,” “Early March: Bay Ridge, Brooklyn,” “April Poem,” “Your Room,” “Night Walking, Seattle,” “My Father,” “Poem about Baseball,” “The New Literacy,” “Swimming,” and “A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country.”

These beautifully crafted and highly imaginative poems of Bowman’s honor the dead and quicken the living. And, this spring, oddly enough, a plum tree blossoms in Leatherstocking country.(less)

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Jun 05, 2012 Karen Chow rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

As a person who doesn't usually read poetry, I found Bowman's poems generally easy to understand. I enjoyed his personification of Mohawk and his imaginative poems about what he thinks and sees on a simple walk through his neighborhood. Very creative.

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May 21, 2012 Abi marked it as to-read

I think I will just really like it.

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About Daniel Bowman Jr.

Daniel Bowman Jr. is the author of A PLUM TREE IN LEATHERSTOCKING COUNTRY (Virtual Artists Collective, 2012).

His poems and essays have appeared in The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, Art House America, The Bitter Oleander, Books and Culture, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Istanbul Literary Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Other Journal, Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, Rio Grande...more

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