North Point North: New and Selected Poems Book

John Koethe is another of those deeply meditative poets. North Point North is my introduction to him. I like what I've read. His work is similar to that of Charles Wright and T. S. Eliot in that some of it forms a dense meditative fog. If we don't quite get it, if the poet's indirection skips off the mind, we continue confident there's a vein worth mining. Generally, we don't let ourselves love what we don't understand. Koethe's poetry, like that of other poets, displays a langauge so rich and suggestive that the reader doesn't necessarily have to get every nuance of the idea to realize some resonance from it. There's plenty to think about. Later a particular poem may benefit from reflection or may mean something entirely different. First we have to let our attraction to the work ripen. The heart responds quicker than we can articulate the response, how we feel. But when the heart responds we have to return over and over again to the gift we're given, even if we never find the words to express why the gift is a gift. North Point North begins with new poems before selecting from 5 previous volumes. His subjects are family and memory, history, nature and the seasons, among other things. And a couple of love poems I like a lot. The concluding poem is "Falling Water," a poem about Frank Lloyd Wright and Koethe's response to him at various stages of his life. It ends with a thought about inventing things again. In an earlier poem he'd said, "A writer's secret is an uncorrupted world." I think that's one thing he does well. His purity of language allows us to find a purity in experience, kinda like inventing everything again, as he wrote in "Falling Water." And he shows us that books like this become constant companions. We need them.