The Bar Habor Suite

My country
is not

a country
It is snow

My garden
not a garden
but a white
plain

My road
is not
a road

It is only
snow - here

in Maine
I mean

Peter Kilgore is in this sense original, and his roots work amazingly from the first European landings at Mount Desert up to the present. He has been acutely aware of the changes to his home state, and city, for years. I am thinking of a poem in the 1977 Presumpscot Review (published at the University of Southern Maine) titled "Portland Renewal Authority," which recounts what the narrator used to see on Portland's streets over against what he sees now; much of what he used to see has been replaced by new buildings and roads. Though Kilgore never mentions Portland in The Bar Harbor Suite, the place-names wash over each other's times in the same way.
Those memories are pushed further back, through extensive readings about the first settlers in Maine and New England. Simultaneously, a number of the "present" sights seen by the narrator of "Portland Renewal Authority" have vanished. A sort of inverse relationship exists between the attempt to broaden one's capacity to comprehend Maine (by divining the recollections and histories of a given place, an old place, say, Bar Harbor) and the rate at which the mnemonic landmarks are being wiped out. Bar Harbor, despite its tourist attractions, may be accessible for the poet because its ancient history seems alive in 1987. Portland is not the same place it was even ten years ago, and may indeed be less accessible for the poet than the Bar Harbor of 1525.
The fact that Peter Kilgore has left Portland, then, is significant. The depth of his feeling for Maine and Portland has altered a great deal, I am guessing, in the past few
years, from a point where he would never consider leaving his home state to a point where he actually did it. The Bar Harbor Suite is a powerful book because it evokes Kilgore's native historical and personal intimacy with his place and because it is a last link with a Maine past: Maine's past and present is Kilgore's past and present. Though the poet has left, at least these poems remain. If the whole Maine context disappears in the current cultural invasion, as Contraband did, then at least these poems remain. Jim Bishop is still in Orono, I understand.
_______________________________________________________

This review was first published in Puckerbrush Review in 1988. Peter Kilgore died in 1992. Jim Bishop now lives in Bangor, Holsapple in New Mexico.

© Dana Wilde 2008; Puckerbrush Review 1988

Contraband: A Recollection
Reading Forays home
The Mind Errant

The Bar Harbor Suite
By Dana Wilde (1988)

The Bar Harbor Suite by Peter Kilgore. Cover & art work by Michael Waterman. Nobleboro, Maine: Blackberry Books, 1987. $3.

The significant news from Portland is that Peter Kilgore has left town. He has gone west, and I mean far west - Washington state. "So what" might be the right response to such news, considering we live in a culture that feeds in some perverse way on mobility and rootlessness. Lots of people move: Bruce Holsapple went west, David Empfield went southwest, Jim Bishop goes underground and disappears for years; Michael Barriault - who knows?
I am talking about the old Contraband crowd, naturally, and thinking of The Bar Harbor Suite all in the same instant. To back up: Contraband suspended publication a year or two ago, more or less officially, or as officially as anything ever got official with Holsapple and Kilgore. To back up more: Contraband in the early 1970s was Maine's first independent small magazine - when small magazines really were small. A poetry magazine when poetry had not yet been industrialized by academia. The Bar Harbor Suite, that is, is published by Blackberry Books rather than Contraband Press, which is a shame. Nothing against Blackberry whatsoever, mind you; the shame is that Contraband is not around to bring out Kilgore's poems.
Now Kilgore himself is not around either, and still with his book in mind, his absence raises questions about what is happening in Maine. Maybe this will get clearer if I say something about the poems.
The poems in The Bar Harbor Suite are brief and formally precise, like the poems in Kilgore's 1976 volume Drinking Wine Out of the Wind. They smell of the Maine coast and of the hayfields inland. A lot of poets work for these smells but rarely achieve them with accuracy. Kilgore succeeds, although his style is scant. The rhythms are tightly controlled and the sound and diction ring true and consistent, as we can expect from someone as persistent and acute as Peter Kilgore.
But throughout the fifteen poems, there may be a need for a few more words. Even amidst bright images and a light tone, an abstraction dropped appropriately from time to time might clarify the purpose, if not the philosophy, underlying each poetic moment. These poems act like Down East haikus. They drive real figures down and through you, sparsely and effectively; that's the haiku part. But the figures also frame sensibilities derived profoundly from a western sensibility - settlers from Europe - and the lack of
abstractions fails to clarify this sensibility. The images do not stand by themselves in some cases.
The tension derives mainly from Kilgore's main theme of time and place. The Bar Harbor Suite concerns the wash of the past over the present, and vice versa. If "Bluenose (as/the story goes)/is where/our trip/began," and if the trip (or just the book) ends "where Route 3/runs into/1," with mention of "Estaban/Gomez (1525)" and "D'Iberville" in between, then clearly metaphors are at work which we do not understand to work in the same way in haiku. Bluenose, that is, suggests Mount Desert itself, which is one of the first places Europeans (Champlain, I think) made records of coming ashore in the New World. The trip began there, with ideals for what might be accomplished: "Unity/Harmony &/Freedom." Needless to say, the three ideals are the names of Maine towns.
So the explorers' ideals and excitement about the New World transform themselves into ideal figures in Kilgore's poetic trip to Acadia and Bar Harbor. A literal trip to Mount Desert in the present is rooted irretrievably in Mount Desert's past. In fact, other places and memories wash into the consciousness of the narrator and his partner and color their experience of Bar Harbor: Nova Scotia, the Cape, and Texas all surface for a moment. I only want to point out that the place names in these poems are figurative, but that the ideas underlying the figures are sometimes blurrier than they might be, and some small discursive passages might be in order.
The sensibility is purely Kilgore's, though. And I say that with the idea that Kilgore is rootedly from Maine. Maine is part of him, he doesn't distinguish by abstraction between one thing and another; in the same way the place is indistinguishable from the time, or all times. The following poem strikes deep in the heart of the matter of Maine for those who are natives, or close to it, and reveals Kilgore's relation to the place: