Kibbee Rd.: Affection

In Poetry, Photographs

By M. D. Drysdale

Some poets celebrate all humanity, with its foils and foibles. Some- one thinks of Whitman- become known as national poets, while others are associated with individual states (Robert Frost). Even some towns have their own poet- Judevine, its David Budbill.

Katrina Van Tassel, in her lovely book "The listening Field," published posthumously last year, narrows the focus still farther. It's a poetic portrait of the neighborhood around Kibbee Road, a two-mile stretch of gravel track high one he ridge in Brookfield.

A teacher, writer, and editor in Guilford, Conn., most of her life, Van Tassel found her way to Kibbee Road in 1973 with her husband, Tom Wuerth. Tom died in the mid-90s, she in 2004, at age 83. Before her death, though, she began a compilation of her last poems, with the encouragement of her friend and near neighbor Jean Mallary. The friendship grew into a rare artistic collaboration as Van Tassel recruited Jean "with her exquisite taste in photography," to contribute photographs for the book- related to but seldom outright descriptions of the poems. They recruited a friend of Jean's, designer Karen Thorkilsen of East Barnard, to create a sensitive design that complements both the poems and the photographs.

The result, published in 2006, is a 96-page book, "The Listening Field" that explores all the nooks and crannies of the Kibbee Road neighborhood in loving detail and careful, imaginative observation. There are 48 poems and about the same number of photos, which alternate agreeably between the long view of the lovely Brookfield landscape and close details like "smooth yellow pears" and a window casing. At times the photographs help us see what the poet sees; at times they smply resonate with a similar mood.

"What better way to pass the time than to notice and capture the essence of place … through the eyes of a poet," Jean Mallary writes in the joint Preface.

Van Tassel's subjects are pretty much everything you would observe on and around Kibbee Road over 30 years: the seasons, wood splitting, quarry stone, a brook that misses its swimmers, an old house, an old bridge, an old pump.

And animals. Animals are an important part of Van Tassel's Kibbee Road, and they show up frequently- a roadkill-eating crow, a woodchuck tipsy on apples, a rainbow trout alone in a pond, a litter of kittens, and the horses that she and Jean share a passion for. Birds, of course, also flock to Kibbee Road, and receive ther knowledgeable due.

The majority of these poems are careful and beautifully-couched observations. They are, she writes in the Preface, "not the usual tourist postcard but times, places, things that touched us." But there's a subtle change in a few poems near the end of the book after Tom dies and Katrina returns alone to Kibbee Road, in which emotion enriches her observations. Here is this reviewer's favorite:

Winter Widow

I must tell you how I spent this day

Chopping grey ice from driveway and path

Chipping until arms stiffen fingers numb

I realize what you have always done

With such ease in so short a time

Roughing up the too-smooth places

To make footing sure

Out you would go into frigid air

Scarf ends flying

Laboring for an hour or so

Returning a winter woodsman

Ice prisms hanging from your beard

I have always taken strength from your going

But always less than you gave

I can see your face

Imagine your hearty laughter

What took so little time for you

Has taken an eternity

Arms heavy as ice

Short hard breaths pluming

A frozen waste of air

The sudden missing you

An icy black hole

("The Listening Field" is available at the Cover-to-Cover Bookshop in Randolph.)