Saturday Review: “Space and Time in the Appalachians” a review by John Charles Ryan forthcoming in NCLR Online Fall 2024 of Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Transparent Mountain: Ecopoetry from the Great Smokies (2022).
From the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina where he now lives, poet Loss Pequeño Glazier deals firmly with the region’s “biological, ecological, and geological grounding” in his new book of poetry, Transparent Mountain. Writing “in the tradition of Robinson Jeffers and other place-immersed writer-ecologists,” Glazier turns his attentive eye to what he calls, in the section “Rock,” “the material archive of what passed here, / not books, not microfilm, not data storage / but the geological register.”
And it is this “material archive” that Glazier explores throughout the book’s nine sections, in what reviewer John C. Ryan calls an “organic mise-en-page” that evokes “the ancient species and deep-time habitats of the Smokies.” It is this “deep-time” lens that allows a shade-intolerant sumac plant to share the page with “granitic forms [archiving] events transpiring over . . . millions of years,” or with the Niobraran Sea (“an immense inland water body bifurcating the North American continent into two” approximately 100 million years ago). As Ryan remarks near the end, Glazier’s poetry allows “this contemplation of deep time afforded by the sea [to turn to] embrace the immanence of the present.”
Read the entire review here while you wait for the release of the Fall 2024 issue in October.
