Time and Place + West and East
Poetry/Photography
Shanti Arts LLC, 2024
$28.95, 178 pages
ISBN: 978-1962082303
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While their first collection, Beneath the Midi Sun, focused on the region of southern France, including Aquitaine, Languedoc, and Provence, the present collection begins on the west coast in their native Washington and proceeds to upstate New York, around Schenectady, where the McCords have a home. In the Prologue poem, “Waters,” they admit to a bias. The poem begins, “As west coast kids our spring-fed lakes / glowed with grass and reeds, lapped / like gentle incoming tides.” The second stanza starts: “As newcomers to the east we saw lakes toxic, fouled rivers snake their way through narrow / valleys and rock-infested woodlands of dead / trees…” But to be fair, all of the poems celebrate nature equally everywhere.
In the Northwest, poems and photographs applaud spider webs, seaweed, sand dollars, barnacles, plovers, Devil’s Ivy, White Hibiscus, Amaryllis, Sunflowers, Daylilies, and more. They revel in the pleasures of Neah Bay, Oysterville, Morro Bay and Tomales Bay. Carol McCord’s closeup photographs of Old Man’s Beard (“Long Beach Lichen”), the White Hibiscus and especially the Amaryllis, the Daylilies and the Sunflowers, are breathtaking, as are her landscapes, ethereal pink clouds in the sky (“Diurnal”) and “Lake at Dawn.”
At the same time there’s an almost elegiac tone when considering the commercialization of the natural beauty, the American urge to develop land for profit. “Neah Bay” starts:
Under skies often gray as the seals
and whales that fed the Makah
thousands of years ago, hills
surrounding this fishing village
once held primary forests of yew,
cedar, spruce, hemlock, maple
thick as salmon season during spawning run.
Today woodlands clear-cut, salmon
boats filled with summer tourists.
A photograph of a headstone for Chief Nahcati in the Oysterville Cemetery (there’s no body there; it’s purely ceremonial) accompanies the poem, “After Death,” which acknowledges the original inhabitants of the land before the white man came, the Espys, the Clarks and the Goulters, those original settlers.
The plot in a rectangular frame of uncut
stones placed surely, yet scattered,
as surely as Nahcati’s spiritual union
with Willapa Bay, as scattered as his tribe
became when oystermen depleted it.
The second part of Time and Place + West and East — East — shifts the focus to upstate New York, the flora and fauna (and photographs!) no less stunning. Poems and photographs of crows, hawks, the oaks, red maples, clematis, forsythia, trillium, skunk cabbage (“Your blossoms burn the nose / hairs, your torn leaves / tear eyes.”) are featured in this section. “Spring Pond Near Saratoga” celebrates the vicissitudes and turbulence of an ordinary pond in the countryside (“Thank Gaia you’re able / to adjust…”). “Names and Places 1984” discusses the etymology of “Schenectady”: An Algonquin word? Iroquoian? Again, the poet laments what “civilization” has done to the landscape, the pine trees that once spread like Persian carpets, now gone. “Woodlands cleared
by Shakers for farm land, cabin
beams, window frames, winter
fires. Today tarmac runs
beside their meeting house,
jets scream like speared horses
above their burial ground.
A gorgeous photograph of a Great Blue Heron accompanies the poem, “Blue Heron.” Echoing Robert Frost, whose focus on nature was likewise notable, Jim McCord writes:
Some say the world will end
in silence pitch-black as night.
Some say in blasts of white.
I admit I’m drawn to light
and often wish to glide
unruffled as this heron
toward diamond-strewn waters
tinted celestial blue
with only a smudge of shadow.
In the poem, “2.6 Suburban Acres,” the poet lays out the McCords’ aesthetic:
Let others cultivate their lands
ordered and tidy as English gardens,
well-plotted as Cumbrian hedge rows,
harmonious as the heavenly spheres.
We want ours to appear wild,
without muzzle, bare its teeth
to symmetry through all seasons.
Want it to roam free, sniff its way
from birthing light to nurturing shade
to deathly darkness as it pleases.
“Orchard Plans” expands on these musings. Winter in the northeast presents a challenge, as McCord writes in “Retreat,” “First Snow in the Pine Barren” (“Sky a gray void”) and “Ill-Tempered Prayer” (“I’m sick of absolute zero in my bones.”), but the photographs are no less spectacular. The photograph of a forlorn pine that accompanies “First Snow in Pine Barren” is so evocative, but as he writes later in “A Winter Tale,” reaffirming their general philosophy:
Take a tip from Nature, I tell myself.
Flow with her flows, shift with her shifts,
change with her changes.
A final section titled “West and East” expands the geographical equation, including a poem set in La Perouse Bay, in the Hawaiian Islands, and a couple of poems set in Thailand. (“Leaves break free from trees and fall through every Asian season in the monastery of Wat Pah Nanachat,” begins the poem, “Thai Leaves.”) “Night and Day Near Cape Disappointment” (“Starless dome by night / dome of cloud by day”) is situated in the southwestern corner of the state of Washington. Others, like “Suburban Deer,” are back in Schenectady. The reader almost gets whiplash going back and forth, and that’s the McCords’ point: the world is one. West and east? The twain do meet. The vast beautiful orb is a garden of delight all over the map. Without putting words in their mouth, the vision is Buddhistic. As the final poem in the collection, “The Forest Refuge in January,” concludes, “At the rock’s
core a waking heart unbinds itself from fire
and becomes a fountain of spring waters.