The Stillness of Certain Valleys - Poetry by David Salner
Publication Date: October 15, 2019
Paperback, 72 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-58-8
Available from Small Press Distribution
Stillness, especially in poetry, is often a virtue, evoking peace, rest, the quiet of nature; but in this new collection of poetry from David Salner, stillness is an aftermath, a consequence of ending and absence. As in the title poem, surveying a community after the closing of the mine that gave it life and livelihood:
The metal lungs never stopped breathing, until
a stillness entered the valley, of weeds and rust,
of underground voices doggedly calling.
There are many species of stillness and loss in these poems, beginning with the first section, “A Dream of Quitting Time,” which offers an eloquent and all too rare account of working class life, its trials but also its unexpected moments of beauty. Salner’s description of a furnace “Burning Magnesium” is remarkable for its lyricism, portraying the metal of the title as a living thing that suffers wounds, as “strawberry blisters riddled the sheen.” There is yet dignity in labor, but it is permeated by the nagging knowledge that nothing lasts. It has been a long time since David Ignatow enjoined us to “Get the gasworks in a poem” as a means to get at the heart of America, but it has never been truer, and rarely accomplished as surely as Salner does it here.
Elsewhere he deals with stillness of a different order, reflecting on the deep stillness of time in the second section, “The Road to Philippi,” which takes its title from a poem describing a Civil War battlefield long after the guns, and those who fired them, have fallen silent. These poems range over historical and literary themes and figures, the past sometimes colliding with the present (see “Walt Whitman at Abu Ghraib”), ending with a poignant scene of Satchel Paige and Buck O’Neil at the site of the Charleston slave market, “rooted in time / in this harbor of souls.”
The final section, “A Summer Rain,” returns us to the present and often to the personal, particularly in several poems where Salner writes of family history, where the remnants of his Hungarian grandfather’s life “rusted in various sheds” that he and his sister were told to avoid, and his grandmother peers into the darkness of an Ohio night, a “mystery she entered when she left / Hungary so long ago.” He wishes to know more of her life, of why she left: “A story like that / I could build a lifetime upon.” But this history, too, is swallowed by silence. By stillness.
In the closing poem, “Summer Rain,” we arrive at last to a pastoral stillness, a wet world after three days of rain:
Here with you, I still feel like that boy
who ran through fields where creek water rolled,
through a soaking rain that was good for the world
and still blesses his bones.
It is an unabashed and unapologetic love poem. And in that love, in the memory of what has passed, in that stillness, it blesses us like the rain.
Praise for David Salner & The Stillness of Certain Valleys
David Salner's poems are full of fresh and evocative images — "a plume of exhaust turns pink in the crossing lights" as we sit with him for the night train. Goya paints "black oil chaos from which / eyes glinted like knives." Whatever world the poem creates, Salner invites his readers in with his exact language and surprising metaphor. The music of these poems is often subtly beautiful, using assonance and alliteration to tie together stanzas and ideas. Salner's work bears reading over and over as we discover how many layers these seemingly simple worlds have.
—Anne Colwell, Poetry Editor of the Delmarva Review
Salner's lyrical poems give us the physical world, its roughness and beauty, and the life it sustains—the miner, the immigrant grandmother, The Stillness of Certain Valleys—and they bring us closer to ourselves and who we were in the rapidly fading 20th century. His work is a treasure for us of this lesser century.
—Greg McBride, Editor, Innisfree Poetry Journal
David Salner's writing appears in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner,Salmagundi, North American Review, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. His previous poetry collections are John Henry’s Partner Speaks (2008), Working Here (2010), and Blue Morning Light (2016).
He has worked all over the U.S. as an iron ore miner, steel-worker, machinist, bus driver, cab driver, garment laborer, and longshoreman. He now works as a librarian.
Salner was honored with grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Dr. Henry P. and Page Laughlin Fund, and two from the Maryland State Arts Council. He won the 2016 Lascaux Prize for Poetry and the Oboh Prize, judged by Cecilia Wolloch. He has received seven Pushcart Prize nominations and on three separate occasions Garrison Keillor read Salner’s work on the NPR show, Writer’s Almanac.
He has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is also the author of a novel set in the 1920s about a fugitive from Montana vigilantes who works on the great Holland Tunnel project and finds shelter among the poor Jews of the Lower East Side.
Salner enjoys book signings and readings. He lives in Millsboro, Delaware with his wife, Barbara Greenway.
His website is: www.DSalner.wix.com/salner and his Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/david.salner.9