A Companion for Owls

The folks at GoodReads sent me a message. It said, and I paraphrase, “it’s been 180 days since you added A Companion for Owls to your “currently reading” list. Would you like to update your list?”

A gentle reminder that I was not holding up my end, not being a good GoodReads citizen. No literate human being, it implied, could spend six months reading a single book, especially not a slender volume of poetry.

But GoodReads is wrong.

They don’t know how I read poetry books.

Very slowly.

Say, one poem a day. Or two. And I read them over several times. And then I sit and look out the window at the middle distance and absorb.

In the case of Maurice Manning’s A Companion for Owls, Being a Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, etc. (Harcourt, 2004), the reading time was especially long. There are several reasons for my lingering. One is that this volume of poetry is not particularly slender, coming in as it does at 128 pages. I’ve read shorter novels. Then there’s the fact that the collection deals with a period of Kentucky history in which I have a great interest. Mostly though, I was slow because I read it once through just to read the poems (of which there are about 90 pages) and then I read it through again to read the poems in conjunction with the endnotes (of which there are about 30 pages, including a 17-page divagation on the theme that it was Kentucky made English Romanticism possible).

Manning is a sometimes antic poet. Anyone who has read his Yale-Younger-Poet prize-winning Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions knows that he loves lists, shape poems, and a sort of schematic vizpo.

Take, for example, the poem below:

for which the end-note reads:

On April 24, 1777, Boone was shot in the ankle during an Indian siege at Boonesborough. The injury plagued him later in his life. That the state of Kentucky is shaped like a human foot is certainly a plausible comparison, though it is not one Boone explicitly made. He did however have intimate knowledge of sadness and would most likely have acknowledged that sadness often encircles joy.

On might infer that Boone left a large footprint indeed in Kentucky.

As with many contemporary poetry collections dealing with historical personalities, some of the poems in A Companion for Owls benefit from an explanatory endnote. Some, however, stand perfectly well alone. It seems typical of Manning, however, to decide that an end-note for one poem implies an end-note for all, whether needed or not. Some are very tongue-in-cheek. The note to “Advice to Rovers” reads:

It is not known if anyone ever came to Boone and asked how to be a Noble Savage.

Manning is also a metaphysical poet and the subject of his Boone poems is the relationship of man to God and nature. We are not dealing with Boone the hero here but with Boone the contemplative. He is also the Natural Man, if not the Noble Savage, a man with stated contempt for Jefferson and his expansionism. Boone as the American Adam is one of the few white men who actually experienced this new Eden. The irony, of course, is that he also partook of its exploration and its destruction.

The tone is set by the opening poem, “On God:”

Is there a god of the gulf between a man
and a horse? …

It is also set by poems like “Without a Vision,” which deals with the death of Boone’s son at the Battle of Blue Licks, the last battle in the Revolutionary War. In this rather intellectual book, it is the poem that touched me most:

Don’t ever name a son Israel;
and don’t ever follow a man hot
for blood into battle, because
he will bring blood upon you:
that is the one wage of vengeance.

I profited from my second reading of the book because the voice of the Boone poems doesn’t indulge in quite the same pyrotechnics found in Lawrence Booth or the speaker in Manning’s third collection Bucolics (Harcourt, 2007). Not that it’s quiet, exactly. But it is as Bobbie Ann Mason said in the Oxford American:

Maurice Manning is a wry skeptic with a streak of romanticism. In his work, each iota and instant matters.

You have to pay attention.

It took a while for me to understand this voice. Once I did, I came to like it a lot, not for what it says about Boone necessarily but for what it says about Manning. As Mason has said, his heart is in Kentucky and it shows in these poems, which might be seen as both celebration and elegy for the wilderness that was and the man who is most identified with it. Perhaps best stated in “Notes on ‘The Natural Man’”

                                                            …Filson said
this country could someday be a polis, a princely
city-state, he called it. …You want
the truth? I was rather friendly with the Indians!
It was the pro-polisites who decided we should kill
the Indians in order to civilize them. I came here
a man of relative peace and all of a sudden it’s wide
streets, evangelists, and courthouse squares…
I’ve got three dead Indians on my soul: What kind
of civilization is that?