Far Company (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780814349526)

Poems that underscore how we commune with those long loved and long gone.

In Far Company, we hear Cindy Hunter Morgan thinking about the many ways we carry the natural world inside of us as a kind of embedded cartography. Many of these poems commune not only with lost ancestors but also past poets. We hear conversations with Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Walt Whitman, and W. S. Merwin. These poets, who are part of Hunter Morgan's poetic lineage, are beloved figures in the far company she keeps, but the poems she writes are distinctly hers. Poet Larissa Szporluk remarked, "The poems in this collection are quiet and deceptively simple. My first response was to be amazed by a seeming innocence in delivery--straightforward, picturesque, and compassionate--that then matured like a crystal into something precious and masterful. We are left with the whole forest having met all the trees one by one. There is so much respect in this collection--respect for natural processes that include intergenerational relationships, shared territories, and myths."

The poems in Far Company reveal a mind and a heart negotiating both self and world with compassion and invention. They are cinematic in the way they navigate loss, memory, dislocation, hope, and love--abstractions evoked in deeply specific and nuanced ways. There is the drone that flies over Hunter Morgan's grandparents' farm before the house burns and the stag-handled knife in a pocket, its single blade "folded inside like a secret" on a train in Greece. But this collection is full of quieter cinema, too--a grandfather bending to cinch the girth of a horse, days "green / with snap peas and wild tendrils," and "raindrops beading like sweat / on the lips of snapdragons." The root of this book is Hunter Morgan's love for family and her love for the land her family has shared.

These poems map a journey to many places, inward and outward, and engage with the natural world and the built world, moving between both of those environments in ways that acknowledge the complexities of such crossings. Often melancholic but never sentimental, this collection belongs with any reader who seeks out literature in the organic world.