Book Review: Pleasures in the Pathless Woods

Richard C.  Bower’s Pleasures In The Pathless Woods takes its title from a quote by Lord Byron about self-determination, something which the English Romantic poets like Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth insisted upon in their writing and its emphasis on individuality and freedom from the cradle-to-death conditioning and institutionalized thinking of society. Byron, in one of the book’s two epigraphs, writes of finding “pleasure in the pathless woods” and “rapture on a lonely shore” where he has learned to “love not man the less, but nature more.”

The speaker we encounter in Pleasures In The Pathless Woods is predominantly alone in various natural settings—but at the same time not so alone. Like the aforementioned English Romantic poets and even the American Romantic-Transcendentalist poets like Whitman and Emerson, the speaker in Bower’s poetry forges connections with the natural world around him to arrive at feelings and epiphanies in unforgettably atmospheric settings otherwise unreachable in the rush and grind of everyday society. Bower describes this inward journey in his poem The Golden Bough as one that takes place “beneath appearance” and “away from the towering mountain of discord and contention.” Away from the sound and the fury of competition and the accompanying shallow and appearance-based objectification it evokes, away from discord and disconnection, the speaker in Pleasures In The Pathless Woods is constantly evolving and doing the inner work necessary for authentic soul-building.

The extent to which the speaker in the poems connects with his surroundings— reminiscent of Emerson tapping into his concept of the “Oversoul” or Whitman’s ability to feel himself a part of everything surrounding him—can be seen in Bower’s Whitman-esque poem Sunshine Smiles Upon My Face. In this poem, which you’ll want to read more than once, the speaker feels himself become one with the ground in a garden, then the garden itself, and then the entire Earth. The poem states that nature has its own awareness and that we become more aware when we realize our connection with the natural world.

The reader will find recurring images popping up in Bower’s poems while trekking along with him through the natural world found in these pathless woods. Three that are immediately recognizable are birds, trees, and bodies of water. Of course, one would expect to find birds, trees, and streams in the woods. Of these three, it’s the avian imagery that’s the most pervasive, with the following winged messengers soaring throughout the book’s pages and across its ever-changing skies: bald eagles, blackbirds, bullfinches, chaffinches, jays, hummingbirds, ravens, robins—and even a vulture. Birdsong is present everywhere in these poems. And what is song but that which binds both birds and poets, inspired by what’s sacred and profane inside them—all the way from the desire to attract a mate to the need to utter what would be ineffable in everyday speech, attempting to reach insights and epiphanies  that dodge the constraints of conventional speech and writing?

 Of course, traditional English Romantic poetry has always had a strong avian presence. Percy Bysshe Shelley, who some would say was the most imaginative of the English Romantics, put it this way in A Defence of Poetry: “A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude in sweet sounds.” And what nightingale could be more famous for this than that of John Keats in his Ode to a Nightingale?  This is the poem where Keats wanted to leave this vale of tears “on the viewless wings of Poesy ,” which was the sound of the unseen nightingale above him singing, and “fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” our brief journey on this planet “where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies.” (One must remember that Keats’s brother had just died recently, and Keats had an obsession with death that moved throughout his poetry.)

 Bower’s poetry is nowhere near as grim as Keats’s poetry could be (especially in the late stages of that poet’s life when he realized that he was dying). Bower’s poetry, in fact, appears to have taken up where Keats left off, and rather than mourn death, it embraces life and the search for the life force coursing through nature and through the tiniest of living things that we take for granted. Neither are recurring images of sunlight piercing through the cracks in the darkness in Bowers’ poetry accidental, and it could be argued that this is poetry that looks for the light even when—as the poet William Stafford put it—“the darkness around us is deep.” This is poetry that celebrates life, perhaps not in as loud of a way as Whitman did with his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,” but in a quieter way that celebrates the pleasures of introspection and the well-examined life.

Perhaps Carl Jung best described the way that creativity can be tapped into as a life-giving force, even when we feel dead inside or feel that all around us is dead and shattered. It’s no accident that Bower used a quote from Jung’s The Red Book as the second epigraph for Pleasures In The Pathless Woods. In the excerpt Jung writes, “did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world how the dead things moved under it, how they grew and prospered, and how your thoughts flood in rich rivers?”

This is what Bower is doing in his book. Starting with winter, the “deadest” of the seasons, he moves on through spring, then summer, and finally into fall, finding life amidst what’s dead, song where it seems quiet, and dawns that follow darkness. The seasonal progression of the book is a thing of beauty as we move with the poet through bleak winter and end with the season most often celebrated by poets in  their odes and reveries: autumn.

It’s this final autumn section that contains some of the book’s most beautiful poems, poems rich in atmosphere and insight—and also with some memorable final lines. We get the sense that as we’ve journeyed through the book’s seasons, we’ve also entered into the seasons of a man’s life and watched his consciousness expand. One poem that comes to mind here is Life Is a Journey with its literal and metaphorical train ride. The poem ends with an epiphany the speaker has while watching scenery pass by through a train’s window: “And it strikes me that the bareness and the meaningless view of the world is an illusion, that things are real, magical, and beautiful even if I could not see them.”

We all have our own reasons for reading poetry. Perhaps one of the most common and universal reasons (aside from a love of language) is to watch a poet’s consciousness move outside the norms of formal diction, expressing truth and beauty in new and unique ways as we try to wrap our minds around them. Richard C. Bower, in this book, has invited us to watch his consciousness grow and develop through the seasons as he becomes more of who he really is, something we all do in our own unique ways as we age and learn, holding fast to what’s important and discarding what is not.  The poems in Pleasures In The Pathless Woods form their own kind of mini-bildungsroman as we watch the speaker find out how he wants to be in the world and how he learns to create a stillness inside himself allowing him to not only have a heightened awareness of nature, but also a sense of peace that comes with the dissolution of ego caused by the false sense of “apartness” brought on by our competitive and contentious world. Bower expresses it best in A Meditative State, another one of the beautiful poems in the book’s autumn section: “I feel the burning embers of a fire inside as I induce deep breathing. Sitting still and the like, my mind is empty of reality and I consider for a change that this is a moment to cultivate, and naturally, freely, there’s an expansion as I reach an egoless understanding.”

At the end of it all,  isn’t this where a deeper understanding begins? Come to Pleasures In The Pathless Woods for a nature walk through the seasons, but be prepared for something more. Fill your backpack with supplies, and plan to stay a while. Get ready to immerse yourself in a transformative read. If you give yourself over to it, perhaps you’ll find new places inside and new epiphanies along the way. If you give yourself permission to get lost, perhaps you’ll find new directions to explore, ones not measured and limited by vectors and straight lines, but extended by their own inner geometry.

You can buy Pleasures In The Pathless Woods on Amazon or at Waterstones