{"id":24371,"date":"2013-12-07T23:56:17","date_gmt":"2013-12-08T05:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=24371"},"modified":"2013-12-07T23:56:17","modified_gmt":"2013-12-08T05:56:17","slug":"true-north-everywhere-michael-sowders-house-under-the-moon-finalist-15-bytes-book-award-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/true-north-everywhere-michael-sowders-house-under-the-moon-finalist-15-bytes-book-award-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cTrue North Everywhere\u201d: Michael Sowder\u2019s “House Under the Moon,” finalist, 15 Bytes Book Award, Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"House<\/a>In his 2012 collection House Under the Moon<\/em>, it’s clear that poet Michael Sowder has suffered for his art, as spiritual seekers do. The first section (\u201cHomecoming\u201d) starts with a kind of post mortem<\/em> of the life previous\u2014another marriage, a father whose marginalia in a book sends the mind reeling in memory and loss, perhaps old systems of thinking, feeling and believing. The direction is linear, forward in direction, away from something and home to a new hearth that in the second half (titled \u201cHousekeeping\u201d) becomes eastern, circular and curiously joyful.<\/p>\n

This book circles back on itself, devouring its own tail, elevating the reader through language and image, literary\/mythological\/religious references and the personal to arrive at a proposed existence in which \u201conly dancing\/will make sense,\/breathing Her breath,\/His, until you find yourself\/looking out the irises\/of every stranger\u2019s eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sowder\u2019s work here is also intensely domestic, many of his poems about raising, as a mature man, two young sons who, are, variously, talismans, mirrors to the poet\u2019s internal landscape, and the embodiment of both God and the universe. In \u201cDecember, Hiking with Aidan, Eight Months Old,\u201d fathering is a practice<\/p>\n

\u2026but not much<\/em>
\nnoble silence. Instead, I attend to<\/em>
\n fist-clenched panics and moon-mouthed<\/em>
\n emergencies.<\/em><\/p>\n

And in \u201cHiking at Oselong, Tebetan Buddhist Monastery of Andalucia,\u201d again with his son, he is quick to exult, \u201cIt\u2019s like we\u2019re in the Home of the Immortals.\/The Pure Land of the Bodhisattvas!\u201d but then doesn\u2019t hesitate to tell us, after he trips and the two of them somersault down into a critical heap, that \u201cEven in paradise,\/you have to pay attention.\u201d And yet even crumpled together in what could have been a disaster, this fright makes electric life and the world: \u201cTrue north everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

The squalls and temper tantrums, the doubts and the dangers of keeping house\u2014keeping life\u2014resolve again and again to the poet\u2019s corrective to let go, to breathe, to\u2026dance. And it\u2019s both exhilarating and, occasionally, a little too self-centered. But in the end, this is if far from a celeb\u2019s \u201chow-I-am-glorious-me\u201d tome. For one thing the language is always fresh\u2014even revelatory– even if the references to rishis of the Veda, Simone Weil and esoteric books on eastern religion start to pile up.<\/p>\n

The form and tempo of these poems vary from a vertical, mostly one-word line shape poem (\u201cInto darkness\u201d) to the arresting \u201cNote to Self\u201d whose lists accelerate in the head like the voice of a slam poet:<\/p>\n

Only when you take the job of janitor, your name<\/em>
\n Scrawled in an unknown tongue above the door<\/em><\/p>\n

Of a room in Her temple of the dawn<\/em>
\n Will you ever redeem your forfeit life.<\/em><\/p>\n

Together the poems often articulate recurring themes–that the poet (and presumably to whom he speaks) must arrive at \u201c\u2026the country\/where what is inside me\/can be born inside You\u2026\u201d and \u201c\u2026to learn\/to break a fall by letting go\/of what you want.\u201d And yet these themes, all tributaries to becoming one with God and the universe, thread through varied contexts: means of suicide (\u201cChecking Out\u201d), re-birth and love (\u201cEver Since,\u201d \u201cWhen I First Pulled Onto the Highway of Love\u201d), marital conflict (\u201cWhen You leave my house\u201d), even a prayer (\u201cAidan Looks at the Moon\u201d).<\/p>\n

And, at the book\u2019s end, looking backwards, the effects have been sublimity, delight. It has been a recounting of how we somehow emerge from old life that has been painful and dark, confusing and self-destructive. The trouble that the poet has experienced, including, at one point, a kind of perverse penance he alludes to in an earlier life passage, seems to burnish him, propel him forward, bleed new life and new light.<\/p>\n

In the 7-part \u201cDelicate,\u201d one of the more memorable poems of a categorically memorable book, the verse moves from macro to micro and back, beginning at the speaker\u2019s son\u2019s blue eyes above the mustache from mother\u2019s milk, to the \u201cjust weightless architecture\u201d of the vaulted night sky to a wife and mother lying injured on the side of the road to the brutal wildness of orphaned fawns \u201ccrying in ferns by the trail.\/Spotted, tiny, crying out.\/To us?\/To the world?\u201d to the emergency medical technician with a blanket to the next morning with boys \u201cdrink[ing] milk and honey from sippy cups\u201d to\u2026well, to all of it, converging as it only can in good poetry:<\/p>\n

Our boys\u2019 voices, the warmth<\/em>
\n of our bodies, a house finch\u2019s song, Jennifer<\/em>
\n opening the door, her beauty,<\/em>
\n fragility, all held lightly, none of it<\/em>
\n ours, cared for, vanishing.<\/em><\/p>\n

#<\/p>\n

House Under the Moon<\/p>\n

by Michael Sowder<\/p>\n

Truman State University Press<\/p>\n

(2012) 85 pages<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>

Photo by Niki Baldwin<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michael Sowder is a poet, writer, and professor at Utah State University in Logan where he lives at the foot of the Bear River Mountains with his wife, writer Jennifer Sinor, and their boys, Aidan and Kellen. His first book of poetry, The Empty Boat<\/em>, won the 2004 T.S. Eliot Award and his chapbook, A Calendar of Crows<\/em>, won the New Michigan Press Award. His nonfiction, which explores themes of wilderness, poetrics , and spirituality, appears in Shambhala Sun<\/em>, The Wasatch Journal<\/em>, and several essay collections.<\/p>\n

Raised in an Irish Catholic family, Michael Sowder was trained as a meditation teacher in a tantric yoga tradition in the 1970s and subsequently practiced meditation in Buddhist and Christian mystical traditions. He is the founder of the Amrita Sangha for Integral Spirituality, an organization that explores and teaches the practices of the world’s contemplative traditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his 2012 collection House Under the Moon, it’s clear that poet Michael Sowder has suffered for his art, as spiritual seekers do. The first section (\u201cHomecoming\u201d) starts with a kind of post mortem of the life previous\u2014another marriage, a father whose marginalia in a book sends the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":834,"featured_media":24375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,69,35],"tags":[1786,1785,1787],"class_list":["post-24371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-daily-bytes","category-literary-arts","tag-house-under-moon","tag-michael-sowder","tag-truman-state-university-press"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/House-under-moon.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-27 16:18:19","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24371"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24383,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24371\/revisions\/24383"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}