"The dry summer of 2003 saw wildfires sweep through the forests of the mountain West," writes Tim McNulty in the introduction to his latest chapbook of poems, Through High Still Air. "By August, a number of lightning-strike fires were smoldering in the deep mountain wilderness of Washington's North Cascades National Park. Four of them fell within sight of Sourdough Mountain Lookout."
McNulty explains how, after the park service decided to reactivate the historic lookout, he "jumped at the opportunity." It was a serendipitous decision: the summer of 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of poet Gary Snyder's tenure at Sourdough, a moment in time immortalized in Snyder's book Riprap, Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels and John Suiter's Poets on the Peaks. Having one of the Pacific Northwest's finest contemporary nature poets atop Sourdough during this auspicious season was bound to inspire something special. Through High Still Air is McNulty's record of his mountaintop residency, and is appropriately dedicated to Snyder, "poet and lookout, fifty years down the trail."
In the too-brief 24 pages that follow, McNulty gives readers a chronicle of weather ("high winds up the Skagit/ pile dark-bottomed clouds/ against peaks and snowfields" and "taste of raincloud moving past,/ streams and rivers/ beginning again"), buddhistic meditations, a litany of the fire lookout's daily duties, field notes and observations on the behavior of wildfire ("I've never seen the utter transformation that is wildfire...this is raw presence, wild and unencumbered"). In McNulty's plainspoken summoning of North Cascadian elements -- heather and hemlock, Skagit gneiss and shadow, mountain ash and mist -- details accumulate until the effect is like an invocation, a heartfelt prayer to this particular corner of the planet.
Wildlife too regularly appears in these pages, including a three-point buck, a Swainson's hawk ("fierce, streamlined missile with wildly rippling feathers"), a short-tailed weasel, grasshoppers, a Townsend's warbler ("a gift from Costa Rican forests"), and spiraling sharp-shinned hawks ("poised, compact and gracefully alert"). McNulty observant poems even take notice of the animals that *aren't* there, like the "delicate tracks of/ small deer,/ nimble handprints of raccoons" or the footprints of black bears on the bottom of a tarn in his exquisite journal entry entitled "August 24, 'Three Bear Tarn'."
Poet Howard Nemerov once explained that "A poem is an act of attentiveness." Mary Oliver furthered this theory by confessing "This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness." McNulty shared both of these quotes with me during a poetry workshop in 2002, and Through High Still Air is testament to his abiding belief in the power of focused attention, intricate details and deep respect for the natural world.
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