Lance Newman is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Westminster University in Salt Lake City. His best-known work is an edited collection, Grand Canyon Reader (University of California Press, 2011), and he has published an extensive list of scholarly books and articles, many of them about New England transcendentalists. Somewhat unusually for an academic administrator, he is also a poet. Knowing this pedigree is helpful in interpreting Proverbs of Earth, which is Newman’s first full-length book of poetry.

In Concision Poetry Journal, Newman describes this collection as “a manuscript of very short poems made from words that occur in Henry Thoreau’s Walden.” On his website, he says, “I usually work with found language and assemble it in traditional and invented forms.” It’s too bad that this background is not explained in the published book, since it clarifies how the poems arose, and makes them more interesting to read.

Because Thoreau lived in the 1860s, the language of Newman’s poems is noticeably old fashioned. One proverb begins: 

Sometimes I peck at a poem
like a telegraph tapping
cash into the distance.

These days, people hardly use telegraphs, but we are nonetheless amused by Thoreau’s observation, “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” What would Thoreau think of the idea that sending a poem is like sending money? He might approve, since he also wrote, “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.” He did, after all, spend his own time writing poetry.

This is the trick that makes Newman’s poems work. By using Thoreau’s words to construct new poems, the proverbs remind the reader of “Walden” without directly quoting “Walden,” and thereby open space to conjure new meanings and connections. The process of reconfiguring archaic words connects the past to an immediate present. In this sense, Newman’s work does not quite stand alone because it assumes familiarity with Thoreau’s ideas as a starting point. At the same time, a proverb is specifically a short, pithy statement to convey advice and wisdom, and some of this wisdom derives from a process that pays deep respect to the original. These poems are at heart about the life-changing influence of reading and absorbing Thoreau’s words.

Newman’s own voice occasionally comes through in lines such as these,

I crave the rattle of sun
lighting a rift in the wall.
Can I grasp a universe
that’s true to ringing hills?

That sounds a lot like a Grand Canyon river guide. However, throughout this work the first person “I” seems not meant to be the poet or Thoreau, but embraces the reader. These bite-sized poems aren’t as strongly opinionated as Thoreau’s writing, but they are a lovely and thoughtful homage to his worldview. In their own way, they have something to say about how to live deliberately.

Proverbs of Earth
Lance Newman
Spuyten Duyvil Publishing
2025
80 pp.

Amy Brunvand

Amy Brunvand is an award-winning poet and an associate librarian at the Marriott Library at the University of Utah.