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Editor's Note: Revived and Then Set Free

Published onDec 09, 2024
Editor's Note: Revived and Then Set Free
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Revived and Then Set Free


With this new issue of Cold Mountain Review, we relaunch the journal as a biannual publication. We’re proud to now have CMR located among Appalachian State’s Belk Library open access journals, and we’ll also be featuring print-on-demand copies of each issue through UNC Press. How fortunate to have found such a good home with such gifted partners!

With this retrospective issue we take several steps back the better to leap forward or, who knows, maybe to lift off and fly: there are birds everywhere in this gathering of poems and one lyric essay—pigeons, sparrows, crows, bluebirds, owls, redknots, and finches.  Our cover image, “Perch #12,” comes from a series inspired in part by that most familiar of all urban birds, pigeons, by an artist, Basil King, who studied at one of our region’s most famous schools, Black Mountain College. “Perch #12” is housed with the third of our fine university partners, ASU’s Turchin Center for the Visual Arts.

Though the other animals are often on our minds at CMR, we didn’t set out to find them as we sifted through the decades of back issues. Yet like an I Ching cast, with each trip through fifty years and more of a journal, work re-emerges to suit the moment. From the hands of two poets, a retrospective issue largely of poetry has emerged, with poems ranging from the 1970s, the first decade of CMR’s founding, to today and three new poems by one of the journal’s founders, R.T. Smith. Aptly, it’s R.T.’s poems old and new, that have given this issue wings. In “Parkinson’s Sparrow,” the narrator finds the poise we will all someday need in the face of fading health, even as his poem perches between the actual life of a delicate sparrow and the lessons that tiny life brings: “I recall the bird’s secret / and see the tremors I know — / disease and its sorrows — / diminished beside a single / sparrow one cold day / revived and then set free.”

Providing habitat for the birds, trees also grow from this issue, the pinecones of Benito Del Pliego’s fire germinating after fire to produce in “Yellowstone: sobre piedra amarilla” a line like a Gary Snyder-inspired Zen kōan: “Your strength will be born from your / nothingness.” Annie Woodford’s “In the City Woods” sounds companionate notes between humans and trees – “These trees store a record / of the same floods as us in their rings” – that Linda Hogan’s “Black Walnut: A Sweet Blood History” powerfully expands. In Hogan’s essay black walnut trees literally hold the earth and myriad lives, human and nonhuman, in place: “Their magnificent underground roots spread out a long distance to hold the moist bottomland soil intact.”

Seasons, cycles, births, and elegies are all here. Like the piles of debris that still line our roads in the Blue Ridge Mountains after the water and wind of Hurricane Helene swept through in late September, the natural world won’t let us forget our human limits. We’ll need the resiliences of community so evident after that storm to weather what’s ahead. And in that world poetry will always have a role. As Catherine Young observes in “Gathering Acorns, Hoarding Words,” “humankind over millennia has held the world together/ with words, a continuous thread woven through hymns and sagas, / echoed across fjords and geyser fields, pastures and yards.” Italicizing the words, largely from the natural world, OUP’s Oxford Junior Dictionary jettisoned from the word hoard of children, Young’s poem works to include and restore them.

For over half a century, Cold Mountain Review has provided a home for writing that explores the interplay of the social and ecological, of what it means to live inside a human skin alongside so many others, human and nonhuman alike. We keep staying with the trouble, building and rebuilding with nature’s resilience. We want to last the duration.

December 8, 2024

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