Where We Live on the Mountain with the Poet

The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse by Red Pine
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I would say I enjoyed reading these poems about 4/5, but Red Pine does such a nice job of annotating and translating into nicely poetic language I have to give it all the stars.

Stonehouse was a Buddhist monk in 14th century China. He did the hard-core training and monastery thing as a younger man, but he lived most of his adult life up on one of two mountains with similar names. His poetry reflects a deep concern for religion more than anything else, and that's interesting to a point for a non-believer like me, but what I really like are his descriptions of life on the mountain. He does that well, though it's a secondary theme for him. "True emptiness is like a translucent sea/ where the faintest movement makes foam/ as soon as we have a body/ we worry about food and clothes" is the type of sentiment he expresses most often, talking about the kinds of things non-practitioners probably don't fully understand. That's cool, but I like this more:

Lunch in my mountain kitchen
there's a shimmering spring water sauce
a well-cooked stew of preserved bamboo
a fragrant pot of hard-grain rice
blue-cap mushrooms fried in oil
purple-bud ginger vinaigrette
none of them heavenly dishes
but why should I cater to gods

He talks a lot about planting fields ("I plant winter melon then aubergine/ I wear myself out staying alive") and carrying firewood down the mountain to sell and tending to fruit trees ("The peach tree I planted outside my door/ has flowered in spring twenty times") and other ways he has supported himself over the years. It sounds like a pretty difficult existence. But he still enjoys the beauty of the place he's chosen:

I hiked staff in hand beyond the pines
and found myself on an emerald peak
a flock of cranes were chasing a hawk
tree shadows darkened the streams
thorns made wild fruit hard to pick
their scent made herbs easy to find
thin smoke veiled the sinking sun
red leaves shaded half the cliff

That's some fantastic imagery. That's 5 stars just for the one poem.

There is a romantic feel to much of the poetry, though more than a little sadness and loneliness attached to his long separation from society. I can admire what he has accomplished along with his commitment even while I wish no religion had ever conceived of the notion of sacrificing so much to achieve something that I (as a skeptic) don't think very likely. I can applaud simplicity such as we find in much of this collection even while I wish it hadn't been necessary to go to the point of asceticism. But I'm many centuries too late to give advice to a man who would have only smiled at me and ignored everything I said even if I had been there to say it... People at least remember Stonehouse, something that can be said of very few people after their death, especially hundreds of years later.

Between romanticism and nature imagery on the one hand and religious thought and instruction on the other, this collection leans toward religion, which is not my most favorite, but there's enough of a mix that there's still lots to like for those in either camp. Well worth looking at.

View all my reviews