Local poet stays creative with latest collection

Carlton County teacher, naturalist and poet Patrick Stevens has released a second book of poetry, titled "Natural Wonders."

The new poetry book follows the author through his wanderings in each distinct season of the Minnesota year.

He begins his journey in winter, the longest season, dealing with dying plants, frost, frozen lakes, major snowfalls, animal tracks and habitat, before moving on to spring and the welcome rebirth of plants and animals.

Summer is his joyous time, bringing long days and longer rambles in the sweetness and light of warmth.

"It's all the things I see in my daily journeys. I do a lot of walking with dogs," said Stevens, who grew up in Cloquet but now lives in Moose Lake. "It's also an 'all-Minnesota' book, Carlton County for the most part, except for one poem that I'd had for 20 years, about walking on a mountain in Alaska."

Stevens ends the year in autumn, moving toward the inevitable death of plant life, but not without appreciation of the process and glory of that season.

Poem titles include "Oldenburg Point," "Solstice Miracle," "Peonies," "Plate Techtonics," "Hunting Zen," "Northern Lights" and "Red-tailed Hawk," among others.

His epilogue is a four-part poem, called "Old Growth."

Here is Part One:

Follow me away

this four-lane road rush

trucks tires whir bump

drumming asphalt

thrumming past

an incessant hum

like water over a fall

push prod pulsing

gaining faster

where

there

is

no sweet grotto,

no silence

no end.

Don't you see

we cannot keep

up this pace?

pull over

by that dirt lane.

Stop.

I know a path

leading west

toward day's end,

where a winding track

drops down a valley

to a quiet haven

a narrow brook

still trout linger

under grassy banks,

willows hanging

low below here

the world quiet.

We will watch water

slowly pool

and flow

toward

great

rivers

simple progress

like thoughts we forgot

in our rush.

This world

was well settled

before our convictions

ripped roots loose

Built roads, bridges,

levies, dams.

Stole every accessible inch

of worth from the soil

the very marrow earth's bones

sucked dry dug torn

refined filled replaced.

If it was green

we cut all of it

down.

"Natural Wonders" is available at the Pine Knot News office along with Stevens first book, "Panning Gold," which includes poems about nature as well as Stevens' memories of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in small town Minnesota as his generation came of age.

"If you have ever wished to know what life in small town, Midwest America was before the revolution of the later 1960s and '70s, before manufacturing was shipped overseas, before the Reagan revolution, before freeways and jets and fly over country was invented, this book will give you an entry into that world: the best parts of it, the gold," Stevens promised.