Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2766118 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-21
• Released on: 2008-11-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 90 pages

Review

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Recommended for poetry lovers or anyone with an interest in the Mississippi
Historic character Huck Finn tells of his adventures along the Mississippi river. In this captivating book of poetry, author Peter Neil Carroll, travels along the Mississippi from Minnesota to New Orleans first in 1972 and now 35 years later. Carroll delightful brings together his insights and observations of the river, the small towns, and the people who live there of present and past. Recommended for poetry lovers or anyone with an interest in the Mississippi.

Well worth reading
Two men who made a trip together along the Mississippi River 35 years earlier now repeat that trip. We are given a moving description of life along the course of the river and the people and places around it. Also we get a glimpse at the course of the lives of the writer and his friend. Both themes evoke sadness and nostalgia for the past but reflect realities of our times.

This book is beautifully written and well worth reading.

Tracing The Human Spirit in our Heartland
Riverborne traces the erosion, confluences, and--inevitably--growth that is available to men of awareness, even as the Mississippi River itself erodes and gives promise to our continent and society. It is a remarkable book, a leaning back into the time when poetry was both literature and timeless social commentary.

It is a collection of poems built around the brotherhood of two men who have lived their separate lives together for over 40 years, wandering the country and building lives and families, following cross-country roads, reading and teaching and loving, losing wives, going on. More than a discussion or remembrance from these men, it is a book of correspondence with past literary figures, most prominently Mark Twain, and the American voices he created and recorded. And it is a discourse with the waters themselves, and the backwater tributaries that pour into the vast Mississippi drainage along with their pollutants and other industrial discharges, and basic "FOUR WORD SIGNS" of eternal hope and food. All of these are washed away, immersed in the waters, and brought back as something more complex and stronger, more multi-textured and more seasoned, than the individual visions these men set out with 25 years ago when they first traveled along the banks of America's river.

Dates in time are given in the titles of the opening poems of this book, emphasizing that change and growth happen over lifetimes, but soon the exact dates disappear from the titles "gone the way two men get bleached/under fast moving suns, rained upon, lose/ the shade of hair, their speed." Time itself becomes another mingling force within the stream, another distillant. Known objects, animate and inanimate change their places and interact: "we parallel their path on the bridged height,/approach tall branches of bare trees/dressed with castaway pairs of gym shoes/a girl's brassiere, strange ritual of wintered students...Here, I said to Jim, `Here's where we start.'"

The travel is a landscape of real symbols...hard, bitter, cruel, and shock-edged:
One sun-glassed cyclist's lettered leather jacket:
IF YOU CAN READ THIS
THE BITCH FELL OFF
`Fell or jumped?' cracks Jim;
he knows about women
who leave men in a hurry...
Her dream; his fear; her insistence; his fury.

Time and experience speak from varied perspective echoes...overlapping universes subsumed in poetic vision. The varied locational echoes are important, adding depth and pull to the currents:
The running river speaks in signs, spills a low wave
to shore, startles a bare-armed mother spoon-feeing
her baby on the grass. Slow sun scorches
the torpid air, the wakened man lifts
a staticky radio to his ear,
catches the first pitch from St. Louis.

There are disembodied shocks that pull one in and out of reality:
"and then Jim spots real trouble in very fine print
THIS PARK MONITORED BY VIDEO SURVEILLANCE

Well, as this book develops its full field of experience, it becomes clear that when you break away, when you are free even in a media-covered country scared of its own shadows, you cannot be nailed to time. You cannot be monitored by video surveillance because the force of life lies outside of time. The river is to vast, too complex within its currents, too inevitable for technology or paranoia to comprehend.

Here is America's heartbeat:
two spinning rivers writhe in circles,
charge into the watery labyrinth:
another beat, another maddened run.

Here is America's torn body,
battered as the continent.
Here tectonic plates broke the earth,
shuddered plains, shook the river
until her water ran backward.

Here in this book is a slow building power that can splinter and reshape us in the heart of our country, where the New Madrid fault will someday reassert itself in the heartland of our country,
as it did in 1811 and 1812 when the waters rolled backward as they will again. This is a book well worth reading and keeping on your shelf, and an experience well worth keeping in your mind.