Sawhorse

Sawhorse, the title of Tony Burfield's latest chapbook, comes from an expressive allusion in the poem of the same name; "Ripping apart an old pallet for sawhorse wood. The potentiality of sawhorse."Sawhorse spans a year of newness, a marriage, a new house and a new sense of place as the poet embeds himself in the grounding process of work. The honest work of a homeowner, a landowner, a husband, a poet. This is the rurality of rediscovering the self in relationship to each other and to the land; the self as the story of place. The poems comprising Sawhorse are rural, contemplative . . . simple, but not trite . . . and yet, Burfield is not putting on any airs, there are no claims to any mystic insight but for the simple newlywed sense of distracted joy, cramping muscles and newly calloused hands. Burfield's dialect is distinct to the American mountain west. His prose poems are often clipped sentences, phrases and fragments, just enough, like the not-too-heavy, not-too-light layers worn by those of the mountain west to accommodate the swift changes of weather. His palette is the lexicon of the foothills life zone, the mountains and canyons of Colorado's western slope; deer bones, cactus, ponderosa, grama grass (too real, too rural even for spellcheck), crags, canopy, pelvis, vertebrae, cord wood, fire rings, treeless peaks, switchbacks, snow, hermits, the dry heat, the dry cold, winters that mean business, stars, snowpack, aspen, sawdust and sap, slot canyon, flash-flood, wildfire and fear . . . parsing scat, feathers, blood and bone. I found myself instinctively checking my socks for hound's tongue burrs when I finished reading it. Sawhorse is an honest and concise chapbook. Twenty-four poems, mostly haibun, a pairing prose-poems and haiku. Reading Burfield's haibun, I was reminded of the Japanese word "fushi" (bushi) with it's etymological allusion to a knot or whorl in the grain of wood or bamboo, while also being the word for song; an eddy, ripple or the endless flow of the Universe, turning briefly back on itself. Many works under the bumbershoot of 'ecopoetics' express the complexity of human impacts on our natural environments and ecologies. Sawhorse is a gesture that relates poetries to places, and of the poets work to comprehend and redefine our placed-ness in our natural ecology and place-making practices in our natural and built ecologies. This Button Rock House series chronicles an emerging topophilia, poetry as a form of inhabitance, and well-deserves a place in the environmental canon of the literary mountain west. Short, yes, and sweet at times, like life, like springtime in the rockies; full of possibility, full of potential.________________________________________From the forward by David Anthony MartinFounding Editor of Middle Creek Publishing & Audio author of Span, Deepening The Map, and Bijoux."As a purveyor of haiku and haibun, Tony Burfield is a finely tuned, and thoroughly engaged craftsman. With concise precision, as measured as it is on-point, Burfield's eye for detail adroitly captures the human place in nature as lived in the harsh conditions of Colorado high country. Read these poems as attentively as they were crafted, following the poet's own guide: "Measure in threes, eye-ball twice, cut once." Don Wentworth, Editor, Lilliput Review"These poems from Button Rock House are meditations, not on a place, but in it. A place on the edge of wildness and wilderness, where the beings of animals, trees, weather, and mountains assume a much larger scale than that of their human neighbors. The unique voice, precision, and immediacy of the language effect a transportive experience as we read. In powerful, quiet moments of clear-eyed song, these poems transport us to the present." Renee Alberts, author of No Water