New release from our friends at Two Ravens Press:
The Simple Men is the second full collection of poetry from David Troupes, an American poet living in West Yorkshire. He applies an assured, eccentric craftsmanship to innovative forms and ambitious insights. The poems of The Simple Men range over hills and down rivers, through truck stop diners and wedding parties, renewing at every turn our relationship with land, love and the self.
An extract from The Simple Men
The Allagash
We were a long time getting there,
an eight-hour succession of highways
past hayfields and pinewoods, potato country,
blink-and-miss-them towns rich
only in poverty, a great
weathergray barn in the middle of its century-
slow ooze down the hillside,
the old God-lump of Katahdin
saluting as we passed, until what we call America
became what we call Canada,
though we weren’t heading that far, but instead
doubled back south, driven now
by the outfitter, the old-timer,
down seventy miles of dirt logging road
deep into the Great North Woods where
like a bird on its eggs
Maine waited—somewhere in the healing mess
of what we did, in the pollen haze
as evening cooled—waited somewhere
under the cloud-rinds as we launched
ourselves into the golden river
and the pace of the unhurried Allagash became
the pace of everything—waited
as daylight lingered in the treetops and we found
not fifteen minutes into it
a female moose and her calf wading the warm
stone-shallow waters, calmly nosing for their meal—
the time they took to raise their heads
and weigh us up and walk into the dark weave
of the forest—my God,
the time they took—
Under a Grey Sky 