The Way History Dries

Landscape is a proportional representation of storyline. You see it in the tumbled and stacked blocks of Spanish, Moorish, and Roman ruins of Spain. It is in the fields of grass contoured to hillsides changing colour in soft mountain winds under an angle of sun. Landscape records earth: trees with their rings, rocks their fossils, mountains their broken, upheaved, wind—carved features. Everything is recorded, at least, before time and weather washes, fades, wears or buries it. Habitation is slowly swallowed. It is a rare thing when history is discovered underground, by accident or through careful digging. People may look at history as erosion, rather than as the culture of life. This book is a soft study of endurance in a comfortable age. It looks at the practice of getting along. Nature does this best; at times we do it relatively well.

The Way History Dries is Inman’s sixth book of poetry. He is also the author of The War Poems: Screaming at Heaven, and SEAsia (pronounced Seize-ya) also from Black Moss Press. He’s earned a handful of grants, and his collections can be found in libraries across North America, the National Library of Ireland, the Central Zurich Public Library, and the usual gallery of outlets. His books work like novels and themes link characters to landscape.