Ralph Salisbury

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Biographical note:  Mixed blood English-Irish-American Indian. Themes: ecology, anti war and world brotherhood and sisterhood. Volunteer U.S. Air Force, WWII, resister Korean War, Vietnam War and Iraq War. My father had only two years of schooling. Because of my service in WWII I have received nearly 19 years of education. My father's father was a Cherokee medicine man. My paternal grandmother was a Cherokee-Shawnee story teller. A natural, self taught musician, with an eloquent voice, my father made a living as a traveling musician and bootlegger.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714063
ISBN:  9781844714063
Author:  Ralph Salisbury
Title:  Blind Pumper at the Well
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Nov-07
Extent:  104pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  156 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Blind Pumper at the Well, Poems from My Eightieth Year, evokes my "primitive" American Indian childhood and young manhood, and it evokes my awareness of modern life, my experience of war and the experience of others. The book is an affirmation of a peaceful life and a life lived in harmony with Nature. It evokes love, that between men and women and that among all human beings. It evokes my awareness of my 80 years of life and my coming death.

Table of contents:
SECTION ONE
(SAYING AND SEEING)
Ask, You Have Nothing to Lose
Words Concerned with Words
Student, Writing
For a Former Mountain Climber
Ecology, Biology and Poetry at Dawn
A Fancy Dancer, Ascending Among Mountain Flowers
“Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness”
In the New Museum the Ancients’ Artas Catharsis Theory Proves True
Moment in Museum
Adam and Eve, Freiburg Modern Art Museum
The Calm of Bronze
Photo of Neighboring Farm Couple
Renoir’s Couples Dancing, We, Depending onWhich Century, Kiss or Do Not
Homage to Henry Moore’s Sculptures on an Outer Wall of the Roemer Cathedral, Frankfurt am Main, and the Figures of Christ Inside
A Sublime Matisse Odalisque and a U.S. Grotesque
Still Life, Museum Living Room
Celebrity and Nail
SECTION TWO
(WAR: DECLARATIONS, EVOCATIONS AND CONDEMNATION)
Sheep Ranch Home, Near Air Base
Warplanes, Hummingbird, Cat and Poet
Blossoms, Wings, Words
Descendants, an All-But-Extinct Bird’s and an Almost-Vanished Vanishing American’s
Night Sky, Indian Ridge
Going Home, After Camping on Indian Ridge
My Country Again Threatening Aggression
A Killer Seeking Forgiveness
A Hunt and After
A Survivor of the Depression and World War Two, I Read a Daily Paper
Some Future Soldiers’ Tic-Tac Attack
Becoming a Man, World War Two
Sky Bent
A Bomber Crewman’s Dance Around the Dead
Bird, Cat and Soldier, Between Battles
Old German Woman, Some Wars
A Cherokee Airman Remembers Two Wars
A Cherokee Secular Formula to Cure Egoism
An American, in a Polyester Suit, on an Egyptian Beach
A Meditation on Aging
Peaches in the Pantry, Some Rhymes for Smug Inheritors
A Nightmare After 9-11
Boat Song
SECTION THREE
(CENTURIES OF LOVERS)
A Junior High Glimpse of the Future
Love Story with Inevitable Denouement
Bird Heard, Leopards, Sloths and Lovers Glimpsed
A Time in the Zoo
Centuries of Lovers
Remembering Innocence
Dawn Coffee Stop, Nearing Home
A Grandfather’s Hope, Wish or Prayer
Early Planting
A Glimpse Between the Pool Hall’s Blinds
For My Wife’s Father, Edward Wendt
An American-Indian Success Story in India
SECTION FOUR
(SOME FORESHADOWINGS)
A Defense Against the Evil Without and the Evil Within
Two Poems in Memory of Nils-Aslak Valkeapaeae
(B. 1943, D. 2001)
Ochoco Forest, a Sound in the Night
Grateful
To My Heart, an Emancipation Proclamation
Inner Page
Medical Advice, from a Patient
The Eloquent Bones, a Second Coming
Hospital Parking Lot
Every Damned One
Night Highway, War
Three Visitations or Evocations
The Suicide of the Son of a Friend
Some Last Words for a Young Poet
For Don Monroe
Seven Days After Burying My Brother
War on, One Brother, Sixteen,and, I, Fourteen, Try to Be Men
A Zebra-Stripe Kite in Gray Sky Above Flags and Graves
For Robert Wessels
Two Birds, One Air Rifle BB and a Summer Without Rain
Rented Rooms, London, New York
A New Year’s Fantasy, on Broadway
Photograph of My Father as Van Gogh’s Peasant in Straw Hat
A Ritual for Approaching My Father’s Death
A Ceremony for Trying to Accept Death

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Excerpt from book:  

A Killer Seeking Forgiveness

From where I will kill
a fellow creature, as
my Indian people have,
for generations, done,

I see
a porcupine,
its waddling body an ambulatory cactus,
which only the most benign intentions
of a poet’s tongue would even try to ease
into garden row or vase —

see pines,
which fought, like two of too many children,
for each other’s ration of sun,
and, now, the stronger lives on,
to gloat or to grieve —

and see,
disputing snow crimsoned by
some earlier hunter’s good fortune, crows,
as black as oil spilled by temblor
or greed’s heedlessness or war.

A sentinel crow is able to see, not me
but camouflaging leaves, from trees,
whose wood may heat someone’s home
and cook someone’s food eventually,

and, then, while wind weaves vines,
as if to mitten this trigger-finger hand,

my desperate family’s first meat,
after days of hunger, comes,
browsing some blossoms so
forgiving they are still enduring this freezing fall.

Unpublished endorsement :  Ralph Salisbury has established himself over a long and productive career as a voice of sanity in a world riven by war, racism, and despair. His poems teach us, among other important lessons, the constant need for compassion. We are grateful for his new poems in Blind Pumper at the Well.

John Witte, author of The Hurtling and Second Nature, and editor of Northwest Review

Unpublished endorsement :  Ralph Salisbury’s Blind Pumper at the Well bears witness to human suffering and to the horrors of war. The poems are generous and kind. Salisbury celebrates the beauty inherent in family, the mysteries of loss, the sadness of the human condition, and through scrupulous reflection, arrives whole, wise, and in the moment. Blind Pumper at the Well is a gift.

Rodger Moody, Editor, Silverfish Review Press

Unpublished endorsement :  Ralph Salisbury’s poems in this latest volume are witness to his genius for words, witness to his reverence for language, and they show his deep and abiding concern for the human loss in wars and the rumors of war. As an artist, Salisbury is at his best here: time and time again the force of his words is framed in sturdy periodical sentences that hit you smack between the eyes with their crescendoing, image-packed truth.

Jim Barnes, author of Visiting Picasso, and editor Chariton Review

Unpublished endorsement :  It’s great to see the energy of an 80-year-old poet at work, in Ralph Salisbury’s Blind Pumper at the Well. Mixing WWII memories with his observations of the peaceful world outside his study windows, these poems celebrate longevity and unflagging concern for peace.

Diane Wakoski, author of Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987 and The Butcher’s Apron: New & Selected Poems

Previous review quote:  This is a poet dedicated to keeping his heritage alive. His book deserves a broad audience.

Maxine Kumin

Previous review quote:  His economy of language, his poet's ear, and his understanding of the contemporary Cherokee experience are clearly shown in this interesting collection.

Joseph Bruchac

Previous review quote:  Nature in Ralph Salisbury's conception is a Presence to be addressed. I was drawn especially to such poems as ‘Oil Spill Spreading,’ ‘Family Task, 4th Year,’ and ‘This Is My Death Dream.’ This is a poet dedicated to keeping his heritage alive.

Maxine Kumin