Color of a Cougar: Poems
by Jan Minich
47 Poems ~ 84 pages
Price: $25.00
Publisher: Broadstone Books
ISBN: 978-1-966677-50-5
To Order: Broadstone Books
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The poetry of Jan Minich in The Color of a Cougar takes us from Ohio (“the change of a season, / autumn in Ohio I haven’t seen / in twenty years, I had forgotten / how fragrant the trees are”) to the Utah canyonlands (“In here Sweetie and I are alone. / A jay is calling from the junipers / and the chipmunks / have been teasing her all evening”). These poems show us the loneliness, yet satisfaction, of solitude as an antidote for grief: “but I have these mountains, / this solitude that never waivers / and comforts me on cold nights.” That a life well lived may, in the end, be lived alone, and that self-reliance, especially in grief, can save the human spirit.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Steeped in time and experience, Minich writes poems enjambed by image, emotion, history, and conversation. Poems that wend their way through forests and furniture, coves and canyons, baited hooks and black gloves, birds and berries and murderers. Poems with the soft approach of padded feet, the brutal grip of claw and teeth. The poem “Youth,” with its hopeful, hopeless conundrum of survival in a time of climate change, “joy filtering into the sandy soil.” The light and sensuality and complexity of “Hanging Gardens.” The chilling historical violence of the Bloody Benders. The dark and troubling nature of human nature in “Ruins,” “Prey,” and “Recess.” Minich channels the characters in this collection of poems to hit a nerve, to staunch complacency. To tell the story of a time in human history when poetry is the only way to tell it.
–Star Coulbrooke, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan, Utah, author of Both Sides from the Middle
Jan Minich plays the long game in his new poetry collection Color of a Cougar. It’s an exemplar of patience and persistence, each poem–even the short ones–going beyond memory or anecdote to find endurance in form. His voice, often elegiac and projecting a vision of our hardscrabble moral predicament, is nonetheless unfailingly affirming. In Minich’s restorative vision, the natural world and the human community, the living and the dead, find solace and survival in the confirmation of the spirit. In “Fortune Teller,” the poet imagines the undertow, “taking me out then pulling me back / to be renewed in the breakers / in the moonlight still farther out,” reminding us that devotion to craft makes the poem, and diligence of prosody is the stuff that makes it eternal.
–Richard Hedderman, author of Still Life with Workboots
The poems in Jan Minich’s Color of a Cougar live in liminal spaces, and their speakers and personae are at home in the dark, as in “Poland, Ohio”: “After the sun sets and the light / is gone, we feel our way / along the fallen tree / to the other side”. Fittingly, it is a book of memory, both personal and mythic, and of hauntings; the poems meditate on the impermanence of human presence in the world. There are places, it tells us, “Where it’s possible to remain / only if one takes an oath of silence / to the stillness waiting there.” This beautiful collection serves as a reminder and a guide, to the remaining, the oath, and the stillness.
–Lisa Bickmore, Utah Poet Laureate
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jan Minich grew up near fields, ponds, and lakes in Ohio. He has an MFA from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in American Literature and Poetry Writing from the University of Utah. He taught literature at College of Eastern Utah/Utah State University for many years and directed their Wilderness Studies Program. Always drawn to water and the outdoors, Jan summers in Bayfield, Wisconsin, where he cruises Lake Superior in a small boat, and in winter, hikes Utah’s canyons. He lives in Wellington, Utah, with his wife poet Nancy Takacs and their two dogs.
FROM THE BOOK:
Spreading Ashes in the Old Summers’ Burying Ground
by Jan Minich
I never thought I would be
in this place in October, the pictures
are all wrong and yet something
feels familiar, the change of a season,
autumn in Ohio I haven’t seen
in twenty years, I had forgotten
how fragrant the trees are,
old oaks and younger maples
when their leaves have turned,
how the insects and frogs
sound almost cautious
heading into these colder nights.
After these deaths, I am given
this season because it takes me
so beautifully into winter I won’t see
we slow down from the cold or grief.
Previously published in 2 River Magazine
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