In One Less River, Terry Blackhawk follows Hafiz’s injunction to ‘Greet yourself/In your thousand other forms/As you mount the hidden tide and travel/Home.’ Hafiz, through this epigraph, serves her well. The book journeys through loves and losses, elegies for friends and poets, and walks for a while alongside Protea, a mythical female persona—before arriving at various explorations of ars poetica. In the search for home, the poems also take on a variety of poetic forms—shape-shifting, crossing boundaries, inhabiting myriad beings. While steeped in nature, the poems nod to city skylines and are never far from an awareness of inhumanity’s toll. One Less River covers a lot of ground and deepens on second and third readings. Set on beaches, shores, or along the Detroit River and on the city’s beloved Belle Isle, the poems follow the author’s “hidden tide” to Venice, Provincetown, Costa Rica, and elsewhere. One door opens the manuscript; another ends it. While borrowing throughout from Whitman, the door in the final line of the collection leads back to Dickinson whose room, with its light and simplicity, invites us in.
Available now from Mayapple Press and Small Press Distribution (SPD)