By Richard Jarrette
No wonder your poems chill a person’s bones
—Wei Yingwu
for Caleb Beissert
Highlands brother hears a black
panther the Appalachian ghost
forest starlit shadow and frost
scream out there poet listening
other side of his glorious rye
feels the phantom slip his bones
as in Granada when the waiter
said señor that’s Lorca’s chair
From FAMINE CHAIR (Saint Julian Press, 2024)
The poem (s) of this volume are in conversation with Red Pine’s Dancing With
The Dead—The Essential Red Pine Translations (Copper Canyon Press, 2023).
My friend Caleb Beissert is an essential translator of Lorca and Neruda and lives
where I am from—the Highlands of Western North Carolina—where the once
common panther—Painter in the local dialect—is yet encountered at odd times
by the chosen few. Caleb heard the waiter’s exact words when he stumbled upon
Lorca’s former spot in the Granada cafe. His story gave me chills of recognition
related somehow to creation. I believe all my poetry to be in conversation with those
who came before and those contemporary mysterious others who are sharing in a
conversation through many genres. All my poetry is a journal of lived communion
with the natural world that in my 75 years has been degraded and killed. All my work
is lament.
