View from Blue-Jade Mountain by Robert Merritt

Rob Merritt’s poems in View from Blue-Jade Mountain  are poised on that fine and tenuous line between the immediacy of the present and the hauntingly rich enormity of the past. “What can we hold on to in the fire of flux?” one poem asks while another suggests “. . . we always walk on holy ground.// The landscape is awash with stars.” Throughout, these poems are imbued with the contemporary, but reach to the past and the ancient traditions of Chinese poets to anchor themselves to a vision, a talisman of blue-jade, a homeplace. Read these poems for the journeys they make across physical and psychic space, the questions they raise, the discoveries they provide both real and profound.

–Jeff Daniel Marion, author of Ebbing & Flowing Springs: New and Selected Poems and Prose, 1976-2001

View from Blue-Jade Mountain infuses the poet’s profound relationship with his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the philosophical landscapes of China to create a many-layered terrain of exquisite light and beauty. The stories and “lost tales” told in this volume will enhance any reader’s perspective by gently guiding “the fine eye to see,” as a line from one of the poems in the collection puts it.  In another,  past and present become one in the speaker’s depiction of a visit to an old friend; now suffering from dementia and living in a nursing home where she is denied the “sweetness and light” she craves from nature, this character  lives fully in the speaker’s memory as the independent naturalist who “sharpened her tools / on Sunday afternoons.” Here and throughout the book, Merritt’s imagery sings with nostalgia and compassion. There is also humor, albeit sometimes a humor tinged with sadness, as in these lines from “Houseboat Conjuring”: “’Time of happiness / cannot be repeated,’ said Qu Yuan. // Oh let me try.” The theme of enduring friendship recurs often here.  Above all, Merritt’s remarkable collection invokes a sense of hope in love’s resilience and in poetry’s power to take us home.

–Diane Allerdyce, author of Whatever It is I was Giving Up and House of Aching Beauty

Rob Merritt writes in the distinguished lineage of Appalachia-based poets, like Jeff Daniel Marion and George Scarbrough, who take inspiration from the transcendent Chinese literary and spiritual traditions. The poems in View from Blue-Jade Mountain evoke the sensibilities of astute predecessors like Li Bai and Shih-Shu, yet very much live in the present, engaged in a world both philosophical and tactile. Merritt is a master of making connections not previously seen, between experiences, places, diverse art forms, and friends who have lost touch. In the sweeping “Book Report,” he creates a direct line between the author Pearl Buck’s mother in China, and the young girl who reads about her in a Baptist college library book half a century later. Just as “Sailors know the hard language of knots,” as he observes in “Not Lost: Island Voices,” Merritt knows and speaks in the hard language of precise images. Once a reader encounters a love poem as tender as Merritt’s “Floating Lanterns,” or a place poem as devoted as his “Why Don’t You Stay, Just a Little Bit Longer?” she will not forget View from Blue-Jade Mountain.

–Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and Basin Ghosts