Drinking the River: Poems

There is elemental life in David Polks poems intimate moments when it seems our remove from the natural world-fatal to it-can be bridged. It is the poetry of that connection in daily life and the imagination. The great river floods a blue wasp sails dreamlike through the house. Suddenly a copperhead lies snake-thick across the hikers path.The poets mind is at once local and transcendent in its reach says the writer William Benton and local here means the western end of Kentucky where the continents four great rivers join. The watersheds birds and wildlife too are the books familiars.The poems often slip seamlessly from narration to meditation. On the Ohio which is immense here the poets canoe gains on a lily pad broken loose and beside it/ a mouse-pale belly up-no longer resisting/ the forward the careless and incessant forward. The overall sequence of the book follows the seasonal recurrence and gradually as it unfolds a life-span is implied. Though most of the poems center on our relation to the natural world there are those too that explore the world of the poets family and other loves.