Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007
Reviewed by Maggie Kelly

One of our WPA members, Knute Skinner, lives in Ireland. I emailed him to learn, among other things, what he might say about the importance of place in his writing. This request coincided with the debut of his latest book.

This book, a retrospective collection titled, Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007, begins with his first published poem, "Stars." The poems are labeled as "Early," "Later," "Fictions," and "Recent." Most of the poems were taken from 13 books that were published at two-to-three-year intervals from 1965 to 2005. The bulk of the Early poems were written while Skinner was still in the United States; the majority of the rest were written in Ireland.

Skinner's attachment to Ireland began in 1958, when his father died. With a small inheritance, Skinner traveled to Ireland. "... I fell in love," he wrote me, "with the people and the countryside. In a curious way, even though everything seemed strange, I felt at home." So two years after his first visit, he bought a small cottage, and has lived there ever since. By that time he had earned his PhD, but chose to raise a huge garden and "worked in a bog cutting turf to heat the cottage and feed the kitchen range."

Although his permanent home was in Ireland, Skinner taught at Western Washington in Bellingham, where he founded the Bellingham Review, and taught "for periods ranging from one to three months a year."

Regardless of which side of the Atlantic he was on, Skinner's work consistently demonstrates several qualities. One of them is his ability to tell a story through detail. Such is the case in "A Small Construction Site in County Monaghan," in which a young worker, like an eager horse in traces, wants to complete a job, but must wait while we watch his supervisor clean, fill, and successfully light his pipe. Suspense builds as the older man talks and tamps and finally can attend to the job. The reader automatically assumes that the most important thing for the younger man was to learn his trade, but we learn in the last lines that it is patience that he really must learn. That sort of wit, that twist, is another device Skinner has skillfully mastered. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, and life caught in a small moment is not what it had at first seemed to be.

Also pervasive in his poems is Skinner's sense of place. In answer to a question I had asked him, he wrote, "Place has had a very strong influence, as my neighours pop up in my poems and a number of poems are set in the country side ...I live just two miles from Liscannor Bay, five from the Atlantic, where the Cliffs of Moher rise dramatically to about 700 feet from the water. But it's probably the hillside meadows and the ancient stone walls enclosing cows and sheep that appeal most strongly to me."

Reading through this collection, one meets Skinner's neighbors and family, learns things such as how long it takes to draw a pint of ale, and contemplates with the poet what it is like to suddenly catch oneself getting older.

return to Bookstore