Jane Augustine
"A rich (while quite beautifully lean) book suggesting many ways of thought, and providing so much music." --Marilyn Hacker

Jane Augustine: A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing

Expanded from 1970s poems regarded as feminist classics, A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing presents a powerful, elegant vision of encountering obstacles and overcoming them. 

“A book of a woman’s life-journey written with the intensities and intimacies of a haunted mindfulness, this allegorical trek seeks to name the essential amid the multiplying circumstances of selfhood, family intersections, pain, yearning and finite time.”--Rachel Blau DuPlessis

In this book, “a woman climbs a mountain.  It is her life.  And it is everywoman’s life.  And it is actual mountains of passes and lakes and camping alone.  These poems go deep into the pangs of the joy and anguish of motherhood, the schisms of divorce, the confusions of rebuilding a life… And they speak of the solace and power in nature’s clouds and rocks. Read on. The poet still climbs.”--Maureen Owen

Critics have praised Augustine’s clarity and meditative depth in her earlier Marsh Hawk Press volumes Arbor Vitae (2002) and Night Lights (2004):

In Arbor Vitae the poet records the sights and sounds closest to her, and even the most transient images are given photographic clarity…. Minute observations serve as launching platforms for plainspoken, first-person meditations on the natural forces that preoccupy us still, on our aspirations toward creating some kind of human permanence.  [Her poems are] field notes on a single life’s passage through a world in which every object has both dark and light sides, with something to be learned from each. –Fred Muratori, American Book Review

Night Lights is just the sort of poetry I like best: poetry that defies the jargon of criticism.  It is not merely “well-crafted,” “lyrical,” “precise,” “meditative” and “imagistic.”  It touches us to the core.  Augustine never forgets she has a reader. She reminds us that when literature really matters, there is a feeling of holy communion between reader and writer. The poems in Night Lights make me feel richer for knowing them.–Deborah Diemont, NewPages.com

ISBN: 978-0-9792416-5-9 $15.00

Western Gothic Romantic Classic 

     Moonlight slips a white knifeblade
     inside the tepee door.

     The ground is hard and the man
     whose lean hipbones hook with hers

     is a stranger – mountain climber
     he said, first ascent in the Andes,

     cited Jefe he said, Peace Corps, strumming
     guitar by the campfire where she stumbled in

     after a lonely hitch in the badlands
     and the black hills.  She’s thirsty.

     Who asks where water comes from
     after a long drought?  She drinks all night

     from his fountain and he from hers.
     He ropes her to his piton and she falls free.

     At 3 a.m. she dreams him as Orion
     climbing the eastern sky with a sword of stars.

     At dawn they wake and laugh; they’re caked
     with dirt they beat out of the old sleeping bag.

     He asks her to stay, to ride and climb
     with him, and she says yes.

     Through desert sage and rock they walk
     back to the ranch house.  Dry country.

     Rattlesnakes, she thinks.  One thin trickle
     piped into the horse corral.

     Inside after stark sunlight
     it's hard to see –

     cougar and bearskin on the bed,
     44 magnum and ammunition belt

     slung on the bedpost.
     From a photo he is smiling

     leaning on a rifle
     wearing a green beret.

 

Climbing Uncompaghre            

                            13,000 feet in the San Juan
                            mountains with Patrick, age 15

          A side trail down
          as if to water
          but the creek is dry –
 
          no path beyond:  we think
          we'll find it later,
          come instead to bones

          a deer's bleached ribcage.
          A sad place, my son says.
          Bare rock‑cliff facing us

          we've missed our way:
          we backtrack, climb
          the ridge and see our path again

          stamped into deep grasses.

          Not our last sadness:
          the winter I left, he came
          to visit, wrote on my tenement desk

          "I cried for my mom and me."
          We ate Christmas dinner on the floor;
          we had no table.

          Now in our summer hiking
          still we carry loads
          on our backs, and trailfood.

          My son says, look at the stream
          running from the peak
          and I say where? where?

          He says, we'll make it.
          Above, a thin scar of path
          crosses the mountain's shoulder
 
          to the base
          of that gray rock‑tower
          where the last scaling starts.