Meet Robert Sund

Robert Sund is one of many poets I came to through Sam Hamill – who, if my memory is working, wrote a couple of those “letter” type poems to him. That’s how I got his name. The first collection of his I read was Ish River and it remains one of my favorite single volumes of poetry. (Northpoint Press maybe.)

He is tagged as a “poet of the Pacific Northwest” and many of his poems, brief in style and tone like the Chinese poets he loved, celebrate the plants, bugs, and other critters of the region.

Sund died in 2001. His Collected Poems and Translations, titled Poems from Ish River Country, came out in 2004. If you have not read Sund much, or at all, I think he’s worth a long look. There is a charity of heart and mind in his work that makes his work essential to me.

If you go here there is a wonderful tribute to his life and work that is loaded with lines from his poems. Here are a couple of his poems I typed up to get you started.

Grey Afternoon in Seattle During the Viet Nam War

This is what it’s like here.

The kittens look up from the floor like calendars.

Across the street, the Jewish family
is thrashing about,
I wonder what they’re up to today,
making a movie maybe.
A couple of weeks ago she asked me, that nice
neurotic mother—
please sir if you would park your car right there
my son he likes to park there
you know the boy just came home from Viet Nam last week
they stole his tape deck and all kinds of
tapes, the poor boy you know he didn’t get very much
money the army you know what they’re like
and he just got back he saved his money
he didn’t have a chance
to listen to them yet.

I said, yes, I’d move my car,
“No hard feelings,” she said,
and I went away shaking my head inside
thinking
Jesus H. Christ.

Centuries Go By

In the world of men
centuries go by leaving
little trace.

A blossom in men is
like a cathedral,
seldom built.

It must be that in schools
when the blackboard is being erased,
under the sweeping hand,
some words
disappear forever.