Kirjahaku

Set in the central Kentucky basins of the Rough, Green, and Ohio Rivers in 1916-17, Rafting Rise joins the storytelling virtues of fiction with the intensity of the poetic lyric to reach a wider audience, including readers of poetry, lovers of good tales, and those interested in the small events of history recreated through the lives of carefully imagined characters. The book's central action is the rafting of logs in winter down the rivers to the lumber mills in Evansville, Indiana. Survant re-creates the whole fabric of the hardscrabble society that lives by this perilous trade. They are tough people, such as Carl Peters, stranded on a raft run aground in a freezing rain, walking in a figure eight all night to stay alive while his fellow rafter Tom Simpson, who didn't make it, ""...lay/like frozen wood/in the bottom of our boat."" Elsewhere, in love poems and poems celebrating the lush riverine landscape, Survant conveys the simple, sensuous moments that punctuate this hard life. Here is Bill Balcom at a camp meeting, eighteen and chafing for adventure on the river: ""When I took/a piece of Susie's buttermilk pie,/I saw her looking,/and when I ate/I imagined/her taste."" But none of the characters is more vivid than Sallie, the female protagonist, a half-mad medicine woman living with her dogs in whatever shelter she can find. Survant gives Sallie such a deep empathy with the countryside and its creatures that she becomes the spirit of the place. But Sallie pays dearly for her empathy with nature, hearing voices over which she has no power. Worse, she has the curse of prophecy, can see the hand of death before it strikes, and is as much feared as needed by the community. Through these and a handful of other characters, Survant fashions a verse epic of Kentucky on the eve of the entry of the United States into World War I. This volume continues the experiment begun in his earlier Anne & Alpheus, combining poetry and narrative to tell the story of several generations connected by place and memory across the artificial boundaries of time.

Weaving together universal themes of family, geography, and death with images of America's frontier landscape, former Kentucky Poet Laureate Joe Survant has been lauded for his ability to capture the spirit of the land and its people. Kliatt magazine has praised his work, stating, "Survant's words sing.... This is storytelling at its best."Exploring the pre-Columbian and frontier history of the commonwealth, The Land We Dreamed is the final installment in the poet's trilogy on rural Kentucky. The poems in the book feature several well-known figures and their stories, reimagining Dr. Thomas Walker's naming of the Cumberland Plateau, Mary Draper Ingles's treacherous journey from Big Bone Lick to western Virginia following her abduction by Native Americans, and Daniel Boone's ruminations on the fall season of 1770. Survant also explores the Bluegrass from the perspectives of the chiefs of the Shawnee and Seneca tribes.Drawing on primary documents such as the seventeenth-century reports of French Jesuit missionaries, excerpts from the Draper manuscripts, and the journals of pioneers George Croghan and Christopher Gist, this collection surveys a broad and under-recorded history. Poem by poem, Survant takes readers on an imaginative expedition -- through unspoiled Shawnee cornfields, down the wild Ohio River, and into the depths of the region's ancient coal seams.

"Embarking from Malaysia where he taught in the mid-80s, Joe Survant's poems in The Stone resonate with the energy and insights of West meeting East, creating a travelogue of cultural and spiritual explorations that teach us that the world is wider and more diverse than we too often imagine it from the comfort of our couches and familiar neighborhoods. These poems teem with mystery and myth as Survant adroitly dispels the vague impressions most of us harbor of Southeast Asia. They give us what one of the poem's shamans describes as the "world without its skin," embodying universal truths from what for many of us is a new and alluring perspective. They offer a new dialect to the truths of suffering and spiritual transcendence that are at root our universal human language." -Richard Taylor, author of Fathers