A SORT OF HONEY by Joe Paddock

In his writing, Paddock ever seeks to find harmony with self and place, and in these poems you will discover outcomes of decades of dream work and the collecting of oral history. More often than not Paddock is a narrative poet: he believes deeply in story, that to make a point it is best to tell a story, that stories are containers for us that make sense of our lives and keep us from going too far astray. Risen from Paddock's home ground, these poems are a revelation of local wisdom, local wonders:

...One night I dreamed

an oral historian's dream:

I was placing memorials

on the graves of my town:

not flowers, but substantial

brown and black audiocassettes,

imprinted, brimming

with the sacred breath

of elders, the STORY.

My sleep had not been good,

but kneeling

amidst rows of stones,

knee bones close

to the long limbo

of the embalmed, I sank

down through struggle

into ease, a broad region

of peace, into the sleep

of the dead.

from "Oral Historian's Dream"