Joe Wilkins' Pastoral, 1994 calls compellingly into the lyric quietness, labor, and rituals of the rural West and its communities, bringing readers close to the earth, to the ditches, to the "flowery stink of alfalfa / hot breath of wheat." Enfolding its reader in a living, breathing landscape, this collection tenderly approaches the lives—of humans, of sheep, of cottonwood, and barn owl—that collide and entangle with each other. With a gentle yet appraising regard for the richly layered concepts of childhood and masculinity, Pastoral, 1994 leans in and listens to the prairie and those living there.
Joe Wilkins is the author of the novels The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die, both of which garnered wide critical acclaim. His memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, won the GLCA New Writers Award, and his four previous collections of poetry include Thieve and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Born and raised on a sheep and hay ranch in eastern Montana, Wilkins lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon.
"There's much to say about toxic masculinity, but nothing clarifies the matter more than our boys, especially our heartland, heart-wrung boys, those boys once so tender as to practice kissing by kissing other boys in ditches like those they would later dig. Because these are the boys of Joe Wilkins' poems—forged by machine shop and rifle rack, by locust-destroyed crops and beetle-killed pines, by grain augurs and crop dusters, by the endless elegies of cancer and farm foreclosures. And their story—which is largely Wilkins' story—as told in Pastoral, 1994—radiates with such plainspoken vulnerability we can't help but empathize. As he writes, 'We believed, as all children do, / that we were a beginning,' and this drought-ravaged, barbwire-scarred portrait burns their beginning deep into the skin of the reader, leaving a brand that marks our love for them, that says we forgive even the brutal mistakes they might grow up to make." — Nickole Brown, author of To Those Who Were Our First Gods
"The poems in this stark and brooding collection invite the reader to con- sider the long-range landscape of the upper Great Plains. It's both a place and also a measure of Time. And the poems here people this place with working people, who necessarily live in this measure of Time. In their time, the people are loyal, fallible, vulnerable, subject to love and confusion. These are real poems, based not on feelings, but on hard things, like raw lumber and barbed wire, new-born lambs and drought, shovels and dirt, fire and dim light. Rightly and beautifully, the poems in this pastoral book do not register a land of plenty, but a land of toil and loss, both a truth and a lament for rural America. Despite all of our efforts, we must live with plight, wherever we are—a plain fact this book conveys with beauty and fine-tuned detail. I admire the lines, the phrasings, the imagery, the music, and the living art of these poems." — Maurice Manning, author of Snakedoctor
"Joe Wilkins grew up in flyover country, or drive-by-and-never-imagine somebody might actually live there country. If pastoral literature idealizes agrarian life, Joe Wilkins means both to assent to that idealization and repudiate it simultaneously. Everyone's life is encoded in blood, but we should also know that in the hands of a poet like this one, life is also encoded in words, words the poet deploys to enliven the past that made him. Consider the grasshoppers in a jar by the boy's bed. He likes the noises they make at night. He knows, if you hook one at the thorax and toss it in a pond, it will twitch, even weighted to the bottom, for hours. It's another thing he never forgets. Read 'Dirt Song.' Just eight lines long. But listen, just listen to what it sings." — Robert Wrigley, author of The True Account of Myself as a Bird
"The poems of Pastoral, 1994 follow a map back to a place and time which, like 'the names of gods no one believed in anymore,' exists now mostly in memory. But though longing naturally permeates Joe Wilkins' elegies to the small agricultural communities of Eastern Montana, the greater ethos is one of confusion and dissonance: what to call the distance between the self and the former self, whether that self be a town or a man who has outgrown its dot on the map. While Western writers like Hugo and Wrigley might seem to be the forebearers of such work, it's the careful music and respectful rhythms of Heaney that I hear in these meticulous and potent lyrics. Masterful and generous, Wilkins works to make sense of his memory of the world not as a thing pinned down, inert, but still alive—as the past always is for us—even in dirge, even as we stand, stunned and reeling, at the wake." — Keetje Kuipers, author of All Its Charms
