BIG CABIN by Ron Padgett

Coffee House Press $16.95

Reviewed by Issa M. Lewis

Ron Padgett’s newest collection of poetry, Big Cabin (Coffee House Press, 2019), is a must-read for anyone who simply wants it told plainly to them—someone who is done with the flowery, the ornate, and urban coolness.  The collection ostensibly takes place during the poet’s stay in a cabin in the woods in Vermont, where he takes advantage of solitude and lush, natural surroundings to write down his observations.  From the very first poem, for which the collection is named, we hear a voice that is simple in all the right ways:

I like it here in this cabin.

I like looking out the window

at the pond and the trees beyond

and with quiet inside.

Sixty years ago I was a boy

with a baseball glove in Oklahoma,

looking down at it and knowing

I would give it away

and not buy a new one. (3)

The rugged brevity and sincerity of Padgett’s voice gives us, as readers, a feeling of trust in his speaker that is so rarely found in poetry.  His wry sense of humor and introspection is also present in “Sweeping Away”:

What I want to do

is forget everything

I ever knew about poetry

and sweet the pine needles

off the cabin roof

and watch them fly away

into this October afternoon.

The pen is mightier than the sword

but today the broom

is mightier than the pen. (22)

However, in this collection, Padgett also includes a middle section of prose that reads like a personal journal of sorts. A long piece broken up into smaller sections by asterisks, Padgett contemplates his identity as a man, a husband, a father, and a human being in community with others. He also considers aging and mortality, the inevitable flow onwards. He writes:

Aside from a bit of amateur psychology, I have never been able to understand other people.  That is, to grasp what drives them.  Perhaps no one does, but what surprised me was how long it took me to realize that my knowledge of other people, even those I called my best friends, was superficial.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons I have gotten along with them so well, another reason being our deep affinities, despite our differences.  Little did I suspect that as they died, one by one, they would take a little part of me with them, just as I kept a part of them. Or so I believe . . . .  

I’ve never wanted to be anyone else, but being satisfied with one’s own identity leads easily to a complacency about it, and though by my age, it’s better to accept than to reject oneself, that doesn’t mean one should not be open to change.  Staying open isn’t easy, but it seems like an optimistic thing to do, and optimism is something we could all use more of (38-39, 44).

The introduction of prose in the middle of a poetry collection is unexpected, particularly as the book returns to, and ultimately finishes in, the previous style of short, spare poems.  However, the departure feels like a deep breath, refreshing and full-bodied.  The honesty of his emotional explorations becomes that much more palpable in the context of the prose.

As Robert Creeley has said, “Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder.”  Big Cabin upholds this praise with its explorations of life, aging, and identity in such honest and authentic terms that one finds oneself grinning and nodding the entire way.  

Issa M. Lewis is the author of Infinite Collisions (Finishing Line Press), a chapbook of sonnets telling the story of a rural Michigan town and a four-generation family farm within it. Her work has appeared in Panoply, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Up North Lit, and Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Poetry Anthology, among others. She was the 2017 runner-up for the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize offered by Calyx. When Issa is not writing, she teaches composition, rhetoric, and public speaking at Davenport University in Michigan and spends time with her beautiful family in all four seasons of the Midwest.