Reviews and Other Comments: This Old
Riddle: Cormorants and Rain
A Review by Barbara McMichael – The Bookmonger
A Review by Terri Brown-Davidson – from The Pedestal
A Review by Chris Dahl –
Editor of the
Short Reviews and Comments:
"Bill Yake has been a
soft-spoken but essential presence on the Northwest poetry and natural history
scenes for decades, especially where those kindred devotions meet. Very few have apprehended
the living, more-than-human world as keenly and rendered it in verse as
precisely as he. Yake's poems
occupy this rarefied but earthy realm fully and richly, right alongside those
of Snyder, McNulty, and Sund. Yake
believes that poetry can heal us "to the extent that it helps us attend to
imagination and perishable wonders," and this is exactly what he
accomplishes in This Old Riddle. If you
would like to see "the sun stuttering on water," hear "ducks and
the hidden arc of their muted chat and gabble," or watch an osprey who
"squared her wings to tread on rain;" if you care about creatures
that run "through a thirst of living things," wish to explore
"the flash behind flesh and the blush under cutbanks;"
or shiver in your heart to "shards of shade and bone" and "the
harsh divination of dark and light," then this book will reward your
reading with delight beyond measure.
Whether traveling in the territory of human love and wonder or through
the "millimeter ripples" of a banana slug, Bill Yake will lead you
deeper than you've gone before, "detecting as you go . . . every muted
forest pulse." Dwelling among
salmon and owls, tan cats and pictographs, caddis, wolves, and water, always the
water, these poems take us all home to a world we never intended to leave. I love Bill Yake's poetry, and I for
Robert Michael Pyle - lepidopterist, essayist, naturalist, author of Wintergreen: Listening to the Land’s Heart, Where Bigfoot Walks, The
Butterflies of Cascadia, and many others, editor of Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings.
“Absolutely
wonderful! I was starting to make
a list of my favorites as I read, and found I was copying most of the contents.
There is not a false note or poem in it. Every page glows with rich observation
and understanding, and the deep music of the forest, the water, and the rocks.
It is more than a brilliant collection; it is the work of a life well-lived,
constantly in tune with the flow and mystery of reality. I will be
returning to this book frequently, I know--my old bones tell me so, because it
refreshes my vision...”
Howard McCord -
poet, teacher, essayist, author of The
Complete Poems of Howard McCord, The
Wisdom of Silenus, The Man Who Walked
to the Moon: A Novella, and many others.
“I'm
in awe. This has to be one of the best books of poetry I've ever held in my
hands. I can't decide whether to chide you for taking so long or for thanking
you for taking so long because of its rarity of care and beauty and strength of
experience.
Bill
Yake’s poems are pure Zen eyes and Zen heart. They breathe from the deepest
part of his being from one moment to the next, demonstrating awakening in the
natural world. He seems to have swallowed the earth whole and entered the
timeless so he can give us actualized mica flecks, wings of frigatebirds,
kindlings of bones that flow out of his bloodstream
mingling with the tributaries of time and place. Bill serves us the magic that
has always been in the layered interconnections of beauty and the grief of
earth’s erosion. He reaches deeply into the tingling soil and transmits the
experience of seed openings, teeth marks of wolves on elk bone, shimmering opal
in Madang, miniscule eggs of butterflies, and music hidden under fish scales.
Every moment of this elegantly rendered collection of poems is worth waiting
for. Bill has not forfeited modesty and awe before the sacred nature of all
living things. He teaches us true reverence, care, and devotion. He is a true
Zen master of poetry.”
“In
Bill Yake¹s work the scientist¹s meticulous attention to detail, the poet¹s ear
for music and the explorer¹s yearning for new territory dance together. This Old Riddle: Cormorant and Rain opens us
to possibility and takes us willingly along, all our senses engaged, to probe
place and story, creature and word. Even
scat sings in Bill¹s poetry.
I
love the order you’ve chosen, as well as the poems. Reading through is like
kayaking around the next point.”
“We
need Bill Yake’s poems, for they are the voice of the land. We love our home
precisely because, bound into its perfect silence, it cannot speak, yet our
praise and worry must come in the only way we can offer them, as words. Yake’s,
fitted into their tight, glittering mosaics, are the ones we choose: the
‘hundred little-god-like ornaments/penciled on the
sky.’ Even the poems to people, even the tender love poems, belong to the wild
chanterelles, the dark spruce slopes. From the sheer breathtaking wonder at how
the land reveals itself, to its fierce defense, Yake’s poems range far and
wide, giving us a possible path.”
Bill
Yake’s poems breathe the moist air and resplendent light of authentic
experience. Yake is a keen and practiced
observer. He brings a scientist's
insight and an ear pitched to the tones and pulsings
of the natural world to his poems. Like
the slow lift of a heron or the glimmer of a salmon in deep current, these
poems reawaken the possibility of wonder.
The Old Riddle: Cormorants
and Rain is a welcome and exuberant
first collection of Bill Yake’s poetry, work that is generous in its
astonishing vocabulary and use of language. A reader needs only to run down the
title listings to recognize the scope of the poet’s attention to, and concern
for, water, forest and land, the various creatures with whom we share the
planet. These poems enable us to make fresh connections to northwest history
(as in “The Mouth of the
Jeanne Lohmann –
“the poems are very
fine. …takes me to the [
Tony Angell – Pacific Northwest artist, author of numerous books
including Marine Birds and Mammals of
Puget Sound, longtime Director of
Environmental Education for the state of Washington