New West Poetry Book Review

Jane Augustine’s “A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing”

By Alex Young, Guest Writer, 11-07-08

A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing
By Jane Augustine
Marsh Hawk Press,118 pages, $15

It’s hard to think of poetry and mountain climbing in the American West without thinking of the Beat poet and the mountain-climbing hero of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, Gary Snyder.  All of us who see mountain climbing as a bit more spiritual than the average weekend recreation owe a little something to Snyder and the Beat generation’s vision.  In a certain sense, poet Jane Augustine also owes a lot to Snyder: like him, she is an enthusiastic mountain climber, a devoted student of Buddhism, an erudite reader of world literature, and a poet who, despite traveling the world, has maintained her roots in the West where she was born.  In her poetry, likewise, she shares Snyder’s penchant for the short free-verse lyric. 

Augustine’s latest book of poetry, A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing, however, is not one of the awkward homages to the Beats that are still being published.  As its playful title suggests, it is an assertive testament of one woman’s life in the West that should be read as both a tribute to, and a gentle poke at, the spirit of Snyder and the (often exclusively male) literary counterculture that claimed the landscapes of the mountain West for their own.  In these lyrics, which manage to embody both the elegiac and the celebratory, the confessional and the mystical, Augustine confronts traditional myths of Western life by defying our expectations about what poetry that celebrates the West should be.

The Western landscape comes alive in A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing with the wild clarity of the summer sky in the Rockies:

great space in motion,

dome of high lucidity,
calm in its lunatic hues

over us.

Such images, as remarkable in their specificity as they are rich in their paradoxes, are an important part of what makes Augustine’s poetry so vital.  In a place that is celebrated in real estate brochures and tourist guides for its timeless vistas, Augustine focuses on bringing the ever-changing details of mountain landscapes alive, with an eye that sees the infinity in each one.  Take, for instance, this description of topping out over a ridge in the Sangre de Cristo mountains:

the mountain that threatened to fall
on you now under foot

the boot’s fulcrum no razor’s edge
but street-wide

paved with saxifrage whose threads
sunder the granite

Moments like these seem to break all the rules:  just as we should be enjoying a moment of conquering satisfaction as we gaze out over the new country that has just been revealed to us, we pause instead to ponder the intricate striations of a tiny flower’s roots splitting the rock under our boot soles.

A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing surprises not only with its imagery, but also with its range.  The collection covers a remarkable diversity of themes--mountain flora, global travel, small town gossip, the inspiration of past writers, and all aspects of family life--while at the same time maintaining, at its allegorical center, meditations on the ingrained myths and natural mysteries that have shaped Augustine’s life in the Rockies. 

The eponymous poem in the collection, which chronicles many of the author’s experiences hiking in the Sangre de Cristos, manages to meander enough to take in issues like relationships with past lovers, destructive dirt bikers, and child rearing, while also presenting a sobering meditation on the notion of “carrying one’s own weight” in the mountains.  It is the final poem in the collection, however, a long lyric entitled “Cloud, Rock, Scroll” that serves as the collection’s finest example of how Augustine’s poetry seeks out unexpected paths while working to challenge traditional notions about life in the West.

This poem, organized into five sections, begins with contemplations of various natural forms in the mountains, ranging from rock lilies to the summer sky, and concludes with a section that turns the perspective back on the author herself, as she sits on her porch working to capture the natural wonder around her.

While this might sound like standard enough fare for a nature poem written in the Rockies, what makes this work remarkable is that these contemplations of natural form come intertwined with a meditation on one of Augustine’s heroines, early 20th century American writer and mystic H.D. (Helen Doolittle).  H.D. was an expatriate, and a writer obsessed with European mythology--It would be hard to find a writer that is less associated with the American West--so how does Augustine justify this unlikely juxtaposition?

The answer comes in the final section of the poem, as Augustine considers what has moved her to this revery upon H.D. and the Rockies.  As she ponders the question, she is reminded of another story:

My heroines
work alone.  “Mountain Charley”
put on men’s clothes, shipped on a Mississippi river

gambler’s boat, went west, panned gold in Victor
and Cripple Creek, sent money
back to St. Louis nuns

for two daughter’s convent schooling.
She was eighteen and widowed.  She had no way to live
but crudely, in disguise.

No myth,
this history hacks itself out in unruly
shapes.

My West, how have you written me?

The story of “Mountain Charley,” a woman who formed a unique identity out of necessity in the West, is also the story of H.D., who likewise made her way into the Western canon of literature by performing transformations just as radical.  The haunting question at the end of the passage--in this context, referring both to the Western U.S. as well as the Western tradition--in many ways defines the spirit of A Woman’s Guide To Mountain Climbing. This poetry never succumbs to the temptation to view the West as a land of unlimited opportunity where a bold (male) writer can reinvent himself.  Here instead is a place which is ours, yet, paradoxically, defines us. 

My West, how have you written me? Like the footfalls of an experienced hiker on a treacherous trail, Augustine’s poetry carries her readers, with tentative but persistent rhythm, deeper into this quandry—and into a West that is a shape-shifting environment of unpredictable necessity and unseen sublimity rather than the beautiful setting for a stagnating myth. We would do well to have more poets following this trail.

Alex Young is a poet from Oklahoma and Colorado currently living in Morocco, where he writes and teaches English at the American School of Tangier.

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