An Altar of Tides: Poems
by Peter Ludwin
73 Poems ~ 111 pages
Price: $20.00
Publisher: Trail to Table Press
ISBN #: 979-8-218-44698-7
To Order: Trail to Table Press or Amazon


Reviewed by Michael Escoubas

Upon my initial reading of Peter Ludwin’s An Altar of Tides, I opined that this is “just one more” book about the natural world. I’ve reviewed my share of them. As I donned my literary outdoor gear, laced up ankle high insulated footwear, I realized that I am nothing more than an amateur when it comes to substantive natural world poetry. Peter Ludwin is on a mission; Peter Ludwin has an agenda. This is a poet animated by love for his Pacific Northwest environs. He is concerned about its future. While Ludwin’s interests lay primarily with contemporary challenges to the environment, this skilled poet possesses an enviable range of subjects which bear the weight of truly perceptive poetics.


About the Title

In my youthful religious training, I learned that “altars” are sacred places. Deities have fellowship with the faithful at altars. Sacrifices, promises, and obeisance coalesce around them. “Tides” are natural phenomena which indicate the consistent rhythms of planet earth. Informed people, such as Peter Ludwin, make it their business to pay attention to the environment based on science, and may I say it … a sense of the sacred being insulted or at least compromised by the actions of people.


Arrangement & Design

The author has arranged his collection under five headings: The Fastening Wood (16), Wind in the Rigging (15), Mirage of the Snowshoe Hare (18), Hay on the Dream Floor (13), and Longing Buried in Stone (11). The headings are fascinating; they are poems in themselves. I invite readers to thoughtfully contemplate linkages between Ludwin’s divisions and the poems collected within each.


Themes Extrapolated

“A Reckoning” illustrates my premise that both the sacred and the secular animate Ludwin’s poetry. Also, its tensions. A Forest Service employee’s remark is the chosen epigram: God put those trees here for us to use! Of course He did, but at what cost? Within the space of eight tercets, Ludwin describes “a massive fir whose bark, / a text to rival Moses’ tablets, speaks its own moral law.” Somehow, this noble testimony to life, longevity, and wisdom has escaped the “saw’s unholy appetite.” Some compromise must be reached between balance sheets and the noble fir which has “taken this tree hundreds of years to tell its story.”

If birds could talk (some folks think they do) would they sound like the protagonists of “Medicine Crow”? “Mimicking men / on their porches, the birds argue among themselves. / It was better before they came, one says. // Then it was just the sun slanting through cedar. / That is the Indian crow. No, says another, / it’s much better now. Who leaves more garbage / for us to scavenge than these people?” The poem continues recalling a struggle between human and natural forces that has long existed but is now exacerbated.

“Testing Ground” is about a 14-year-old boy on a charter boat out to sea for salmon. Ludwin has a way of plumbing the emotional depths of his characters. In this instance the boy has mixed feelings …

      I watched the captain bait my gear,
   club a fish someone else had caught. It flopped
on the slippery deck, then lay still,

a thin red streak trickling from its mouth.
   Riveted by the event, the blood that seconds
      before had propelled it to the lure, I trod
   the line that separates life from violent death,
grasped at some means to keep the fish.

However, the second an 18-pound coho strikes his lure, another type of struggle occurs within the young man’s psyche. Yes, through the exhilaration of the fight, he had what he wanted. But the last two lines have me scratching my head: “The fish, yes, and the dolphins off the bow. / And something more, something more.” What is that “something” more all about? The best poets give you something to think about. Peter Ludwin does exactly that.

An Altar of Tides is a collection of wide-ranging subject-matter. It is historically accurate and informative. Ludwin is an expert in detail, a skilled poetic craftsman, who is energized by the good he can achieve through the instrument of poetry. Having met Peter Ludwin through his work, I will never again think in cavalier terms about our magnificent environment.
 


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