Local author John Bragstad is at it again, this time putting pen to paper to create an elegant book of Northern free verse poetry set in our back yard.
In Who’s Watching Who? John, a former teacher, pastor, canoe guide and long-time Marriage and Family counselor, now retired, brings to life the simple things in nature that many of us miss in our sometime frantic, frenetic, hustle and bustle that makes up our daily lives.
Eminently readable and comforting, simplicity belies the power of his words neatly strung together like pearls on a necklace, or flung like pebbles on still water.
In “Haunting Moon” John captures a nugget of emotion many have felt when the sun disappears:
Fear is the afterthought
of imagination.
The hobgoblin of minds
that will choose not to rest.
In “Fall Weather,” he recounts:
It seduces us with days of warmth,
Promises us more sunshine,
Offers us discordant paths
Through forests of maple
And cathedrals of pine.”
A verse from “Fog Land” stirs, evocative and emotive:
Alone, on a rolling sea,
The deaf quiet,
The unsettled heart,
The possessed calm.
A poem entitled “Canoe Paddle” is written from the perspective of a canoe paddle:
I’ve carried songs,
Raced furloughs of rip-roar,
Tabled for your trail lunches,
Fought for places to end your day.
There’s even a piece called “Baseball in a Northern Town.”
These 158 pages are the work of a gardener who harvests words like a farmer harvests his or her crop. John offers you wild flowers and ripe fruit, soulful loons, warm campfires, lakes lazy and dreamlike. In every poem there is beauty. Some verses will stir at you like a youngster stirs the hot coals of a campfire, and for some, memories will rise like sweet smoke of a time past, rekindling hopes for a new flame, a new path forward into the rugged wilderness, the first steps forward discovered in these pages.
John’s book can be picked up locally at Drury Lane Books, Lake Superior Trading Post, and Birchbark Books & Gifts in Grand Marais. It can also be ordered online through Amazon.
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