The weather outside is definitely frightful, but there’s still a little time to grab a few last-minute gifts. Two new poetry collections by Bloomington-Normal artists might be just what you’re looking for — and the perfect addition to a cozy holiday at home.
Like his last collection, “Ticket Stubs and Liner Notes,” that focused on rock and roll, local poet Tim Hunt’s new book, called “Voice to Voice in the Dark,” is chock full of mid-century imagery.
Described as a road trip across America, Hunt’s Americana is not wistful about the Baby Boomer era — nor is it overly unkind. Rather, Hunt gazes on the past through a present-day lens.
Many of Hunt’s poems catch people and places in moments of seeming mundanity, capturing complexities of time and context that hit differently, depending on which generation you’re from.
“The nostalgia’s an interesting issue,” said Hunt (a Baby Boomer, himself). “We can look back and think, oh, that was wonderful, or we can look back and say, wow, I didn’t understand what was going on when I was there.”
What grown-ups perceive as “simpler times,” in other words, weren’t necessarily so simple.
“I don’t think of it as nostalgia," he said. "I think of it as a dialogue between the past and present where they clash a little bit and try to accommodate each other.”
While many of the poems in the collection are imagined or extrapolated, one from a familiar place is drawn directly from real life.
Hunt’s piece titled “A Photo You Meant to Take (I-55 South of Dwight, IL)” describes a barn viewable from Interstate 55 that he noticed during frequent trips to and from Chicago — the barn's slow, inevitable decay a metaphor paralleling the life span, and how time changes things.
“In the America of the mind, it is the seeming to be old that counts,” Hunt reads, “weighing against the perpetual now as if this, whatever it is, was. … In this America of the mind, the past is an accent, a décor. And this is different than the abandoned barn glimpsed from the car window, each trip sagging a little more.”
Another new collection
There’s something else between the Twin Cities and Dwight worth noticing, and it is the subject of another new collection called “Fugue,” by photographer Ken Kashian and poet Kathleen Kirk.
Their subject is the Weston Cemetery Prairie and Nature Preserve, located about five miles east of Chenoa. This 3.5-acre tall grass prairie is home to at least 71 native species that live peacefully among the dead laid to rest there.
In their beautifully constructed, handmade new art book, Kashian and Kirk offer close-up images of eight wildflowers with accompanying poems on cards tucked into an accordion-style, round paper structure. The result is a one-of-a-kind piece that is part art, part poetry, part horticultural manual (with input from local biologist Given Harper), part anthropological archive — an accompanying booklet has additional verse and photographs, plus an essay by historian Bill Kemp about the site.
There’s a photograph of Ohio Spiderwort, for example, which up close has a jumble of magenta tentacles and led Kirk to pen “The Tangle of Life.”
The pair also was inspired by the juxtaposition between humans and nature at the site, with several pairings alluding to how the prairie cohabitates with the gravestones in Weston Cemetery.
“I wanted to really acknowledge the fact that this still is a cemetery,” said Kashian, who experimented with using long exposures on his camera as the wind whipped plants on the prairie, creating a ghost-like effect.
“When you reacted to it with your poem,” he said to Kirk, “it did what it was supposed to do, which was to bring them together in such an artful way.”
Copies of “Voice to Voice in the Dark” are available at Broadstone Books, Small Press Distribution, Amazon, and through Tim Hunt’s website.
Information on purchasing one of 25 limited-edition copies of “Fugue” can be found on Ken Kashian’s website.
