Dear Friends!
I am happy to finally announce that my latest book, a volume of poetry, is now available from Angelico Press. Trivia fact: Mythologies of the Wild of God is my ninth book—which means that now I have as many books as I have children. Wonder of wonders.
As I’ve mentioned before, the process of writing these poems, or most of them anyway, was grounded in an exploration of the landscape in and around my farm here in Waterloo Township, Michigan. What resulted is a collection of poetry that has an “ancientness” to it, an almost cthonic eruption of a deep language of symbols and images more akin to myth and folklore than to the more urbane and ironic poetic idioms characteristic of most contemporary poetry.
Some of the poems are set according to formal meters and genres, some are free verse, some hybrids between formal and free, verse and prose. And some are even collections of dream journals, verse, and found poetry. Like life, the collection is chaotic—a life lesson I learned from one of my patron saints, Robert Herrick. The majority of the poems were written over the past two years, many of them in my deer blind (there’s nothing else to do out there most of the time—and no interruptions!). A few, however, are from earlier in my poetic career, including one, “Queen of the Northern Isle,” which I wrote as a song when I was twenty or twenty-one, and was probably my first experience of stumbling into the realm of folklore (or faerie) via the imagination. It seemed to fit the atmosphere of the collection.
The poems in the book, as you will read below, range from the deepest soul spaces of wonder and revelation to the realms of despair and grief. In short, the entire spectrum of human experience.
I have had the great honor of having a number of friends support me on this journey, foremost my publishers at Angelico Press, John and Kari Riess and Jim Wetmore, as well as the true Renaissance woman Lindsay Rose who created the cover art after reading the collection (love you!) And I also owe a debt of gratitude for the kind words of three comrades from the Guild of Poets: Martin Shaw, Katie Hartsock, and Daniel Polikoff.
“I love these poems: pungent, swift, unexpected—they've all been baked in the same oven, but are very different loaves. Martin hurls us into sorrow and wonder; into the difficulty of living and the everyday raptures falling always around us.” Martin Shaw, author of Bardskull “If the mesmerizing shield Hephaestus forges in the Iliad—a panoply of cosmos, earthly calendrical rhythms, reaping and sowing, dance and grief, battle and harmony, and a holy devotion to creation—could be translated into a 21st century collection of American poetry, it would be Michael Martin’s Mythologies of the Wild of God. Martin guides us to recognize our impoverished world as quietly ablaze with symbol and ritual, where even a single tree is a ‘palimpsest of the vanished wild, a talisman.’ The poems sing with human touch and cultivation, with barn coats and honing stones, with planting and prayer, with Michigan farmland and Detroit boulevards. The ancient god’s city at war is here, too; the fight takes place on the field of mortal souls and otherworldly spirits, and while it is ongoing, Martin’s poems give us solace and strength to meet it, remembering we inhabit terrains ever replenished with grace, where ‘pollen-heavy catkins hang like green christs in the breeze.’ This is a collection to return us to ourselves, in sorrows and glories, ‘as sweet and as wounded / as life,’ as only poetry can.” Katie Hartsock, author of Wolf Trees “Nature and godhead twin and twine like ivy climbing silver beech in this book of poems. At home in the woods and fields near his Michigan farm, Michael Martin takes that rich sensorium as launchpad for interior journeying any and everywhere. He calls one poem ‘The Between,’ and we most often find ourselves in that liminal zone where sense passes into spirit in its full panoply of forms: Blue God, Centaur, Crane Maiden. Precariously balanced between unquenchable grief and glorious plenitude, between haunting ghosts and visions of the Beloved, Martin transports us to worlds that—magical and mundane—we come to recognize as our own. Such imaginative power is both artistry and blessing.” Daniel J. Polikoff, author of In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke: A Soul History and translator of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus And, in the spirit of gratitude, here is one of the poems from the collection, one which surprised me when it appeared. It still surprises me. THE CRANE MAIDEN The black walnut trees have lost their leaves And seven vultures perch on its limbs, overlook The pasture where a hog’s head lies bleeding, Having been thrown there, the blessing Of a farmer’s gift, with the creature’s offal Feasted on by crows and grackles, Where slant rays of the sun reach through the maples Of the windbreak in a luminous hallelujah. All summer I built a hut in the forest, Through rain, through heat, through wind, through mosquitoes, The air sweet with the swelling trills of grasshoppers And the croaking of the passing sandhill cranes. At Michaelmas I placed an iron stove in the structure, Split logs of walnut, cherry, and oak to last through winter, And my work was complete. At All Soul’s Day the meadow down the road Hosted a gathering of cranes, a society that hallowed The barren land with the promise of children. But of a sudden they disappeared, leaving not a feather behind. Some nights I would dream of a girl Who, with a voice as sweet and as wounded As life, sang of a crane who’d lost her mate: The crane maiden weeps For her love whom she seeks In the shining of stars up above. But upon awaking, though the words remained, The lilting and mournful tune would escape me And left me with a sorrow I could not shake. In late March, when the skunk cabbages opened Fleshy chalices to early bees, I dreamt of her again. She told me of her beloved, that he had vanished, And that it was my task to help bring him home. I begged to be excused—I had a garden to plant, Bees to tend—but she responded only with weeping. She looked up, I thought, to speak, but the call Of coyotes lulled me from sleep and she fled. I readied the garden for snap peas in April, Fashioned a trellis from hickory withes and twine, Then cleaned garlic beds, seeded lettuce and leeks, Gathered fiddleheads, mushrooms, and ramps. The sun felt warm, but the breezes still blew cool, And somewhere deep behind the keening of the wind I could trace a sound of lamentation, as if uprising From the entrails of the earth, a profound sadness Released with the waxing of the moon. It drifted to me from the far side of the marsh, And though I tried to resist it, at last I left the garden To find the wellspring of all this sorrow. At length, trudging through leaf mold and vernal pools Rich with tadpoles I came to a circle of aged and knotted Oaks where I found a wounded crane covered in leaves, Its thigh bereft of feathers and bloodied. It looked at me, It seemed, with the eyes of a man, eyes which it closed As it whimpered in pain. The bird resigned to All Things, I drew my knife—the bird winced—then cut a sleeve From my shirt, part to clean and part to bandage the wound. I brought water from the pool in cupped hands to the crane, And it drank. I stayed for a moment, said some words Of supplication to the close and holy spirits of the wild And returned to the garden the way I’d come. That night I dreamt of a young man, a kind of archer. I watched from a distance as he crouched behind a fallen Cedar at the crest of a swale. When he stood, I saw that he Bled from his right thigh through a bandage of white cloth. He looked at me, nodded, and I awoke. One evening at the beginning of May, when the voices Of chorus frogs sounded through the marshes and the pools, I heard a knock on the door of the hut. Opening It, I found a young couple: a fresh-faced youth, his hair Slate save for a lock of auburn at the front, and a maid, Her night-colored hair bound in braids by crimson wool, her Skin luminous and clear, her eyes the green of the sea. They had come, the youth said, to give me a gift of thanks, And the maid handed me a willow basket brimming With morels and honeycomb, the arched handle entwined With poppies and dandelion. Their child, she said, would Soon arrive and they would always think fondly of me As the godfather. “But how do you know me?” I said. At this the maid stood a-tip-toe and kissed me on the cheek, The youth again nodded, and, comforted, I awoke.
Michael, thank you for coming on our steam and sharing some selections from this outstanding volume. You are a true Bard my friend.
Thank for sharing your beautiful poem. I took liberty and sent it to my daughter. Going looking for your book now.