Description: Poetry. In one fell swoop, OLD MAN LAUGHING exposes the incredible and the ordinary with tenderness. Knots, herbs, blurred nymphs, a duck on the husk of a muskrat’s den. King’s nostalgia–never sentimental and at times bittersweet–beckons old songs and lovers to the fore, asking not for remorse, but instead for giving due the wonder of childhood and the exquisite ties we make to people as years pass. In this world, the civilized and the natural shape us imperceptibly, and in King’s view, a satnguine perspective is the reward. “I thought old men would know more about earth or love or mornings than I do,/ standing at sunrise in my own backyard,/ married for years, dazzled by my ignorance.”
Review: If there is a bearable lightness of being, it informs and leavens the poems in Robert King’s Old Man Laughing. The poems are serious, exuberant, occasionally formal, and full of delight. They can combine the quiet spareness of ancient Chinese poetry with a wild extravagance and from the two birth a deep humanity. When you read the opening lines of “From the Book of Rope”—“First, there is love. Secondly, / the square knot”—you know a linguistic and human adventure is unfolding. The whole book is that adventure, as the flashlight of precise observation and the transformation of insight into poetry illuminates first this, then that—love, rope, music, maps, sorrow, aunts, fireflies, the accidental. From the child’s view in “What It Was Like Those Days”— “Even the dead, I thought then, / grinning as I biked around town, / were happy in their own way”—to the final lines of “Loss”—“Especially old, especially alone, / I laugh as, walking, I falter”—reading these poems will make you feel buoyant, human, and lucky.”- Veronica Patterson, author of Swan, What Shores?
From Old Man Laughing Ghost Road Press 2007
Robert King is the director of the Colorado Poets Center web site: colopoets.unco.edu. He lives in Greeley, Colorado, where he teaches part-time.
You can listen to Bob reading his poetry here, on his website.
Cover painting by Bari DeJaynes
Girl at the River
Something about the Ice Age catches my attention
so I don’t switch the channel. The Himalayas arose,
turning a stream of winds north, cooling the world an eon,
and to prove this today a young woman kneels
beside a milky cascade, nothing around except
the rocks of the rest of Tibet. She is alone
and with the camera crew, I understand,
though so American I constantly forget. “Carbon
dioxide,” a narrator intones, the way it wears
from rocks into rivers calculating the rate of loss
of something important. She slides a bottle sideways
into the continual rush, then caps and labels it
to assay later in camp. Though I have dabbled
in the chilly music of variously tuned creeks,
this is brutally different, hard and remote, and I
am warm and old, ignorant of almost all
the elements she measures. And I almost kneel
in the thin light of the screen, sadly prayerful
at the careless endurance of her momentary life,
cold and rich like worn rock, like heavy-laden water
creamy with its suspensions, this girl gathering
the waters of her future, bending down again
to the torrent, the cold ache of the gigantic past
streaming like science through her singular fingers.
