One Less River

by Terry Blackhawk

In One Less River , Terry Blackhawk follows Hafiz s injunction to 'Greet yourself/In your thousand other forms/As you mount the hidden tide and travel/Home.' Hafiz, through this epigraph, serves her well. The book journeys through loves and losses, elegies for friends and poets, and walks for a while alongside Protea, a mythical female persona—before arriving at various explorations of ars poetica. In the search for home, the poems also take on a variety of poetic forms—shape-shifting, crossing boundaries, inhabiting myriad beings. While steeped in nature, the poems nod to city skylines and are never far from an awareness of inhumanity s toll. One Less River covers a lot of ground and deepens on second and third readings. Set on beaches, shores, or along the Detroit River and on the city's beloved Belle Isle, the poems follow the author's "hidden tide" to Venice, Provincetown, Costa Rica, and elsewhere. One door opens the manuscript; another ends it. While borrowing throughout from Whitman, the door in the final line of the collection leads back to Dickinson whose room, with its light and simplicity, invites us in.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

Published July 9, 2019

Reviews

[Keith Taylor]

I think this book is getting a few readers out there, always difficult for something from a very small press. I was pleased when Blackhawk asked me to write an Introduction to the book, which ended up appearing as a kind of Afterword. Here is what I wrote:

For several decades now I have thought of Terry Blackhawk as one of the writers central to the literary activity in Detroit. She taught in the public schools there and then established one of the essential Writers-in-the-Schools programs at InsideOut/Detroit. The city has been proudly at the center of much of her work, particularly during those tough years before the place became fashionable once again with the young. See “Down in Detroit” here in One Less River for her scorn of those “who assume whiteness/unites” in their distaste and fear of the city.
But Terry Blackhawk has always refused to be pigeon-holed in one category. In addition to her portraits and celebrations of Detroit, her work has always been informed by her knowledge and appreciation of the natural world. Sometimes – and maybe its most interesting manifestation in this book -- that world intrudes into or intersects with the city. The massive Detroit River, so important in our national history, flows into many of the poems in this book, including the gorgeous “ice music,” where Blackhawk finds words for the sounds of the breakup of the ice on that cold torrent – “ice melt ice lace ice/breaking.”
Detroit is, of course, an essentially American city. Its river defines one of the country’s borders. Terry Blackhawk is comfortable claiming or reclaiming her country and its literary masters. She honors the influence of Emerson, Whitman and, essentially, Dickinson, and she enters into dialogue with them, filled with respect even when she might want to argue. She does this while she makes her associations with contemporary Detroit writers; the title poem of the book is an elegy for the poet and performer known by his first name, Blair, a dynamic presence in the life of Detroit before his tragic passing when he was only in his mid-40s.
The title, One Less River, and the epigraph from Hafiz (“As you mount the hidden tide and travel/Home”) prepare us for the sense of loss that is in much of this book. And it is true; many of these poems celebrate or lament the things that are no longer there. They are indeed poems of aging. Yet the vividness of the perceptions, the strength of the language, and the willingness to engage difficult positions in our world, invigorate the poems and prepare us for all the work yet to come.