Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse

These poems are more than cups of warm tea for any evening. They have taken me home, to my best self, to my own best songs, which have spilled from me unbidden since receiving this book in the mail a few days ago, after too many years from first having discovered David's work in The Sun. I don't know why I waited so long. I am a persnickety poet and a particular reader, and these poems somehow reach my every depths, a comforting breath through the passing days. I sense already that I have found a brother, a friend in the wilderness and sanctity of David's poetry, a companion who will live with me for many years to come, over and over, deeper and deeper I will enter these poems in my own Judevine in the middle of the sea. The care, the crafting is all there...the honest cleverness, the humor, the paring, the exquisite art of poetry, honed and honed: yet still fresh, surprising, alive, never glib. Thank you, David, for caring so much for what you are here for, dedicating your life to such sincere madness as the sanity of great poetry. Amen.

David Budbill has given us an essential book...poems that make us laugh and teach us of the humility of everyday living. Like Zen poet Han Shan, Budbill writes as a "crazy cloud," Zen mountain poet who celebrates the commonplace. The book moves through seven sections, from laughter to senses to sensibility, a clear and barebones book of poems that really matter.

"Then I quit the world, and withdrew into these mountains/ as I could lose my self and see the world/ with clear and simple eyes" (p. 21). These 98 poems were written by a mountain recluse, Judevine Mountain. According to the book jacket, David Budbill discovered the hermit living in the woods behind his house. These poems gaze inward, into the "sweet Zen emptiness" (p. 100) of the "almost sixty"-year-old poet's reclusive life. (It is no coincidence that Budbill was born in 1940 and is a poet also.) He calls his life "a vessel of silence" (p. 5) that allows him "room for thoughts to wander" (p. 17). He writes: I have known a solitude and stillness so profound/ that my own breath/ is the only evidence there is any life around" (p. 15).These poems cannot avoid comparison to the 1200-year old songs of reclusive-poet, Han Shan (better known as "Cold Mountain). Cold Mountain was a true hermit and genuine sage. Bill Porter (a.k.a. "Red Pine") is the most recent translator of Cold Mountain. He likens hermit poets to "a mountain stream that brings fresh water down into town" (Tricycle, Winter 2000). In our "age of frantic travel" (p. 11), "a time of get and spend" (p. 92) for those "who yammer about money all the time" (p. 33), Judevine Mountain's wise poems have much to offer. "Struggle is what it means to be alive and free" (p. 37). "The end of life is in the mirror" (p. 59). "Be glad with just a cup of tea,/ a bird's song,/ a small book of plain poems, and your anonymity" (p. 47).This collection raises the question of whether Judevine Mountain really "quit the world," as he claims, to live the solitary life of a true recluse, for he remains connected to the outside world through the telephone (pp. 51, 88), "health-insurance premiums, property taxes and car-repair bills" (p. 27). While it may not be the work of a true solitary, this "small book of plain poems" is insightful, rewarding, and at times even humorous. If this collection leaves you wanting more, then wander further upstream to Red Pine's COLLECTED SONGS OF COLD MOUNTAIN (2000).G. Merritt

There's not much comparable between Judevine, maybe Budbill's best known work, and Moment to Moment except for their quality. Although Budbill speaks with similar clarity and simplicity, his subject matter changes from the voices and stories of Judevine to David and the hermit poet's more interspective thoughts. His voice remains strong yet sensitive and his ideas remain original.