In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs (Anansi, 2012) is billed as a novel not as poetry but rarely is poetry that poetic.
Which flies in the face of widening the idea of poetry to admit more range. Poetry can be communication, refusal to communicate, a leaping art, a clever clever to truth, an object without use held with emblemic or artefact weight, can be purged of conventional syntax and words so long as it works.
Yet here is this text, dead-center of contemplative, reflection, luminous beauty, admitting pain and loss. It is perfect candidate for poet’s voice taking itself preacherly and it doesn’t. It is its own thing. There’s a character with a desire for finding reconciling and compassion and accepting limits and striving. He doesn’t veer from nasty parts of life nor does he showcase them. There’s an inhalation of quiet. You look thru his peephole of what he knows and what gets revealed. Not predictable, not random nor uneven.
Each sentence is written with care, woven into a whole. Call it a novel call it poetry.
The real conundrum is could I pull off financially, socially, effectively, buying a box of the books, even to give away like Gideon Bibles to ensure more eyes read it? It’s interesting that I’d want to. What book have I ever read that I felt was both beautiful, useful and well-done that I could unequivocally back as adding good to the world? It must have happened before, surely, but right now, I can only see this.
And yet I wouldn’t want to oversell it, cause disappointment. It is not a jubilant adrenaline book. It has a muted detachment, the careful picking away one days as one rebuilds strength tentatively, figuring out what one is capable of doing. It is taciturn in a way. It says no more than it needs to. It ends in a logical place that I hadn’t anticipated yet feels right. It makes regular neutral speech seem brash and awkward. There’s a moral sensibility of a philosopher not a theologian. It is the story told as by man imprisoned and released in Pakistan, learning to figure out his story.