Stomp and Sing: Poems by Jon Andersen. 2005. 74 pp. paperback, $12.95. Curbstone Press, 321 Jackson St., Willimantic, CT 06226. 860-423-5110, email: info@curbstone.org. http://www.curbstone.org

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Jon Andersen is a high school English teacher in Connecticut. His poetry has appeared in a number of periodicals and he is the recipient of the 2003 Working People's Poetry Award (Partisan Press) and the 2004 People Before Profits Poetry Prize (Burning Bush Books).

As with any book of poems, I come open-handed, empty-minded, waiting for epiphanies, expecting revelations. Not every book of poems delivers. Some deliver in part. Some are full of holes. Some are whole like watermelons in the morning, dew on the rinds, full of sweet pulp and seeds, nourishment and hope. Such is this book of poems by Jon Andersen.

Here are grit and celebration, teaching and learning, innovation of language, and plain, solid narrative. But most of all there is the truth, hard and simple, told in each poem as if the truth were some rare commodity that is quickly sold and lost in this consumerist,
well-advertised society, but needing to be preserved. No gimmicks here, no frivolity, no tricks up the semantic sleeve - just language pure and direct, telling the stories of hard-working men and women, the world, and the poet himself.

Take, for instance, "Green World." It reads almost like a paean to the nuclear submarine and to its birthing home, New London, Conn.: "pipefitters and carpenters stride like Greek heroes," "the graceful Trident slicing through the Thames," "a sleek gun-metal Leviathan carrying sun-hot fire in its belly." These are words from a mower of lawns who tempers his awe of a nation's military might with a simple message of hope:

     Somehow we will find a way to go back
     on this promise we've all helped to make:

     the end of the whole green world.

Gardens are everywhere in Andersen's poems, and the theme runs like Paradise through a sacred text: we can stop ourselves before it's too late, regain the promise given us, walk with the gods again. Look at the images in "Planting":

     The church bells clang and ring in the night air,
     and, without even a hint of God for me now,
     sing a song of everything
     just as it is: dirt-caked palms,
     tired back, choke-fired truck engine,
     the dark road rising toward thick stars,
     then down the hill and home.

This is not the unmaking of Eden but its making. It is work, sweat, struggle, but it is also music, mystery, light, and comfort. Somehow, it is all woven together as a song, just as a garden is woven of seeds, roots, blossoms, and fruit.

Andersen notes that "the freshly harrowed field/ ready for planting/ stretches away from the village/ all the way to the graveyard." The link between the living and the dead must be acknowledged. How else can we grow and sustain ourselves? The poet's role is to expose these connections. This Andersen does again and again in "The Street Named After Spencer," "The Foreman Calls in Sick," Postcard from New York City: May 1994," "White Mountain Poem," "My Mother Paints Again," "The Real World," and so many other poems in the collection. We are shown where we go astray, where we find paths, where we find the parts necessary to find the whole, the whole looming suddenly like a garden to be harvested. We are shown ultimately where to find ourselves.

But Andersen is no pontificator. He knows of the labor of which he speaks. He was a lumberyard worker, trail crew member, landscape laborer, warehouse worker, and farmhand before earning his teaching certificate and becoming an English teacher. His father was a truck driver and his mother a school cook. These poems are as much a record of one man finding himself as it is a record of how we might get a nation back on track. And throughout the poems he never forgets the role that work plays in making him who he is.

The book is divided into three sections: "Fierce to Go" about his impetuous youth; "The Trails," about his work on a mountain trail crew; and "The Real World," about his current life as a mature man, a teacher, a husband, a father, Connections again: like all trails they leave one place to take you to another, and these trails become that bridge between the idealism and bravado of youth and the responsibility of being in "the real world." On one trail, he experiences a baptism in the wilderness: "the wind/ was sheer enough to scrape and blow the lies/ straight from my swollen soul." It's at that point he "dreamed of girlfriends, finding honest work/ and peace, and planned some ways of growing old."

Once Andersen's in the real world, he shows us his greatest poems of hope. In the book's namesake poem, "You Must," he says: "You must have a hope/ that will let you stomp and sing! in any cold dawn." Perhaps the greatest affirmation of hope is in "Pit Bull," where the poet-father saves his young son from the jaws of a pit bull while its smirking young owner looks on. Andersen wants to "go track that jerk down/ grind his grin into the curb, swing his dog/ dead against some tree or pole or wall." But then he reconsiders: "maybe only twenty years have fallen away from the day/ he was a new human being helplessly crying in someone's arms." How quickly we can break open the violence locking our hearts simply by connecting like to like—we were all innocent babes at one
time. Only refusal of violence restores that innocence. Only the sensibility that comes from seeing our lives inseparable from the lives of others will allow us to once again regrow the Garden. Such gentle power resides within us. Such hope should fill us. Read Andersen's poems and be filled again. You will not come away empty-minded. You may find some revelations.