| Tim Hunt

Wisdom Awareness in Poetry (Robert McDowell on September 23, 2010)

Tim Hunt’s Fault Lines is a book I wanted to publish the last few years I worked at Story Line Press, but I was never able to do so. That’s why it’s such a thrill to hold a copy from The Backwaters Press.

Hunt is a poet who truly knows the “silence beneath the stories/where we learn the things that matter most.” This is knowledge that is deeper than book learning. It’s akin to the ritual and spells passed on from generation to generation among the Celts. It’s a wisdom awareness that comes of living life close to the seasons and the earth. It’s a humbling awareness of the heavens above and the deep chasms, recesses, and memories below our feet.

A great scholar and student of Robinson Jeffers, Hunt in these poems joins his mentor as a guardian and oracle of our deepest memories. Whether his ostensible subject is fifties television, peace marches, fishing, language, or jeans, Hunt gracefully guides us from the topical to timeless reconnections with lives past, lives only partially understood, and landscapes we’ve forgotten but need back if we’re ever to evolve into the shining people we’re meant to be.

Hunt’s is a chronicling, questing poetry. It’s quiet strength and maturity hold a cultural and historical space for us that a lot of the chattering, flippant writing all around us simply cannot do. The poems in Fault Lines arrest us. They say, Slow down. Remember what it felt like to breathe deeply, consider quietly, and reflect?

What a pleasure to meet that here, now.

—Robert McDowell is the author of the bestselling Poetry As Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), and the forthcoming The More We Get Together: The Sexual and Spiritual Language of Love (Feb. 2011).