By Green Mountain
By Green Mountain
Allan Brown
Introduction by Al Purdy
6 X 9 inches, 48 pages
'BROWN'S EXCELLENCE RESIDES chiefly for me in his seeking mind, which sometimes turns a thing or situation or person over and examines it, and again sometimes achieves small magics that are entirely unpredictable. His methods do not permit any kind of perfection, and I am sure he is not seeking such a pernicious thing, even tho I have described his prosody as 'seamless.' Substitute 'rough-smooth' or 'inevitable'—or just designate him as a damn good poet, for whom all this description seems entirely unnecessary. His poems are necessary.'
And if there is (was)
a real mountainman
(sucking the wind,
sipping the dew)
the path he must have used
is gone by now—or a new
one leading where he didn't
go anyway—the usual sprinkling of recognizably
human detritus
(the eyes grow blind
with sun on snow).
—from By Green Mountain
"Allan Brown's two-line epigraph to his book By Green Mountain — 'I searched for heaven / and earth was my discovery' — has the precision of meaning that characterizes the whole of this meticulous yet adventurous work. The poetry we are about to read is the outcome of a spiritual questioning, not of feelings supposed to rise from the individual's or culture's continuousness with nature. At the centre and basis of Brown's experience of the world, however much he honours its concrete specificity, is the indefinable sense of his own somehow immaterial destiny."
—Waves
Allan Brown
Author
Allan Brown was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1934. He and his wife live in Kingston, Ontario.
