Book Boat

Review: River Tips and Tree Trunks, Notes and Reflections on Water and Wood, by S.H. Semken, $14.95 from Ice Cube Press, 205 North Front Street, North Liberty, Iowa 52317-9302. ISBN: 1-888160-63-2. icecube@inav.net

This book is attractive, deceptive, puzzling, often irritating, like a river, certainly, and also like a river with a strength of character not obvious at first glance. In fact, with my first look it was the irritation that was obvious, mine at some wording and sentences that if they appeared in the work of my writing students I would x-out, re-route, suggest alternate flows and passages, like this one:

This type of behavior, once again, is that of an immature person, one that is accepted precisely because it allows one to be unaccountable, and irresponsible, and at times, promoting an attitude that looks forward to a scolding.

But the more I read in this book, the more I allow myself to enter into it and be carried by it, the more I realize the pull of this man’s language, certainly, the more his book is a river. At random these sentences:

“The Snake River requires gesture.”

“At the Royal Gorge in southwestern Wyoming you’ll find emerald water. It is a slow motion landscape.”

“We are a society hoping for, and convinced that maids can pick up after us, silently and miraculously.”

The last sentence, especially should cause reflection, reflection as Thoreau knew of it, the tree lined bank on the water, or was the water reflected in the trees? “We are a society hoping for...” what? The mystery, the lack we readers must fill if we enter into this man’s prose with the necessary respect and appreciation, and then followed by a wonderful and most appropriate image. This sentence could be slipped into Thoreau’s Journals and no one would notice.

Semken is also a poet, though he may not write verse. But his sensibilities are such that he has either trained himself well or absorbed from the rivers and trees he had meditated upon enough of the stuff of language that makes for poetry that he needn’t take time for the study necessary for a good poem. His meditations have lead to the kinds of associations that are the heart of the poem. Follow him through the section on trees: “Family tree, Tree as Sacred, Divining rods, Ocean tree, Walking sticks, Totem Poles, Barns, Flow through Giant Redwood, Food bearing trees, Bark.” His bark, which is, as should be apparent by now, also Whitman’s “barbaric yarp” is what we need value. It is uncompromising, and it takes us to the deeps of his language, a language as rooted as those trees, rooted certainly, but allowing us, along with him, to flow through, to be taken out of ourselves silently reading, along with him on this physical, mystical journey. Semken knows his rivers and he knows his writing. (And he also knows that rivers are trees [“The river turns to tree turns to water to river: the shapeshifter theory is resurrected”]). His is a book to take along with you so that you may be taken along with him. There are many ways to say this, perhaps this is most appropriate: this man would be always welcome on any canoe trip or whitewater rafting trip I’ll be taking this year or any year.

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