COMING INTO GRACE HARBOR, poetry by Jan Minich

Publication Date: March 15, 2023

Paperback, 88 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-33-2

$24.50 retail, $18.00 from publisher

Jan Minich’s new collection begins in “Reflection Canyon,” and in classic poet fashion his words do double duty, describing the physical reflection on the water where he is “anchored in a graveyard of trees, / oddly shaped skeletons” before going on to write of reflections of another kind, of memory and history and more psychic skeletons. Similarly the title poem reveals that Grace Harbor is both a real place and a state of mind, where “a tree that fell parallel to shore” is “like an old man / moving back and forth / between going on and getting ready to turn back.” Minich writes from the perspective of that pivot point, even when he doubts the efficacy of language: “I don’t wonder at my loss for words. / I’ve used too many for any lake / or river to care.” But for his readers who do care, his words are themselves a state of grace: “We’ll all hold onto one another / but sometimes we’ll let go / to be able to swim to shore.” Most of his poems take place in and on the water, with the pace and flow of water, adrift in space and time for “There’s no certain point in water.” And in the absence of certainty, Minich finds grace, as in his closing image “Turning a heavy coat inside out / I watch a man beside me, / a father or son with that same / expression on his face” – all of us, across the years, “Coming Home.”

Praise for Jan Minich & Coming into Grace Harbor

Jan Minich’s enveloping, illuminating book, Coming into Grace Harbor, collaborates with nature, sounding it out, in the tradition of Gary Snyder’s Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, for texture and color: “the familiar edges of fallen trees”; canyoned water containing “a purple badge . . . its harder image softening / the walls of blue-black patina”; handling, marveling, noting the human and its scars: “burned out bridge / among mayapples and ironweed.” This is no pristine, idealized nature. Drakes are “ugly and dirty /and especially mean to the hens.” A displaced doorstop stares up from pond ice. Direct and compassionate, these poems know that we are inseparable from nature and at the same time alone in it. As reader, I feel lucky to live among Minich’s words, to share their music, “warm in their cold of knowing winter,” “the wild of the place / . . . opening up all around.”

—Angela Ball, author of Talking Pillow

Jan Minich is a poet persistently informed by the numinous beauty and mystery of the natural world. And yet in this collection of far-ranging, poetic gems, it is the interface with the human that resonates with the most heartbreaking clarity: a muskrat dying in the arms of the poet’s father; the atomic shadow of a sister who died young, appearing and re-appearing; a son, a wife—touchpoints of even deeper connection. They coalesce both concretely and in their abstract correlative into people in place. Often these forms and renditions are rapt by or awash in water: turtle-laden, black depths heavy with decayed leaves, the lap-lapping of waves on the banks of Lake Superior. That sense of place, in fact, here performs through a dialectic between bodies of water—the Great Lakes region and the desert washes and canyons of Utah. But it also elaborates itself, spiritually, between two other poles. One of loss and one of renewal: “you sorted through years like dried flowers, this one for the certainty of lasting color and that one for the fading.” And while following arroyos that “hold out like sage/pinyons and junipers,” dry for the moment from flash floods, the poet acknowledges the “need to feel for something not human/ to take away our fear of dying.” Again and again he posits the grace notes between wildness and the self. Are you ready to integrate your interior landscape with the sensibility of place? Let Jan Minich be your guide into that harbor.

—David G. Pace, author of Dream House on Golan Drive

If you’ve ever wondered what Thoreau might make of today’s wildernesses, her canyons, lakes, and rivers ride along with Jan Minich on the bow of his boat in Coming into Grace Harbor. This volume takes us to the lakes and time of Minich’s youth and into this day of devastating climate change. Minich writes about “the pull of the sky,” while “we keep the truth in a jar/ of washed glass and lucky stones.” We go to a place “where time descends/to just below the surface.”—A place of dark water, mystical herons, and dying cottonwoods. The poems are relevant and elegant, a mighty combination.

—Mary Gillilan, Editor and Publisher of Clover: A Literary Rag

Jan Minich has the rare ability to create poems as vivid as experience itself. His words smoothly transport readers to boats suspended dreamlike on lakes and to childhood memories—made so real they seem my own, not just his. He entwines with natural scenes to become an element of nature himself. How rare to find a voice so unaffected and authentic. Gratitude to this poet for expanding the boundaries of poetic possibilities.

—Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate and Poetry Unbound featured poet

About the Author

Jan Minich was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and grew up near fields, ponds, and lakes in Poland, Huron, and Lisbon, Ohio. He received a BA in Literature and Writing from the University of Arizona, an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in English from the University of Utah with specialties in American Literature and poetry writing before moving to Carbon County, Utah, and teaching at USU Eastern/CEU, where he co-hosted a long-running Readers’ Series, was Director of the Wilderness Studies Program, and where he is now an Emeritus Professor. Always drawn to water and the outdoors, Jan cruises Lake Superior in the summers in a small boat, and in winters hikes Utah’s canyons. His books include The Letters of Silver Dollar, Wild Roses, and History of a Drowning. Jan lives in Wellington, Utah with his wife poet Nancy Takacs and their two dogs. Their son Ian Minich is a photographer in Salt Lake City.

Cover artwork Evening Turquoise 3 by Eugenia Gorbacheva, used by permission. Find more of her artwork at https://www.saatchiart.com/homelikeart.