ruina montium - Poems by Jeremy Paden

Publication Date: June 10, 2016
Paperback, 48 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-25-0

Available from Small Press Distribution

For sixty-nine days in 2010, thirty-three men were trapped far underground in a copper mine in Chile. The story of their survival and rescue is by now well-known; but never has it been rendered in such a compelling manner as the telling in these poems, which take us into the darkness with the miners. In Paden's recreation of the events the intimate humanity of this modern-day resurrection is rendered with exquisite feeling for the miners below and their loved ones above. Many of the individual miners appear here in poems inspired by their specific stories.

But as suggested by the title—a term coined by Pliny to describe Roman hydraulic gold mining and its effect on the land—this is also a meditation on our relationship to our planet.

How dangerous
we have made this earth.

The requirements of modern civilization make demands on our fragile environment that place us in individual and collective peril, and we must take to heart the lessons of "Los 33" even as they fade into the background of memory,

Hollywood in post-production
the world back about its business....

Still, there is another resurrection miracle accounted here, in the poem "desierto florido" that tells of the Atacama Desert in Chile, the driest in the world, which nevertheless bursts into brilliant bloom in those rare years when the rains come.

Hope—and life—endure, the poet assures us.

Praise for Jeremy Paden's ruina montium:

ruina montium is a collection that does the most important thing poems can do: honor. Based on the 2010 Copiapó mining accident, these lyrically precise and beautifully attentive poems give voice to the miners who were trapped that day and practice the ancient and good magic of survival. Both tender and clear-eyed, these poems are strong enough to lift each one of us from the darkness.
—Ada Limón

“Los 33,” the miners trapped in the 2010 Copiapó mine disaster in Chile, must have resorted to biblical allegory in an effort to comprehend their physical predicament. Eventually, the sixty-nine days underground simply became metaphysical—Jonah, Daniel, Lazarus, Christ—these analogies are just. The language of deliverance and the aspect of resurrection rightly rise in these richly contemplative poems. Eerily, these poems collectively anticipate being “born again,” but not yet. The poems in this collection make the waiting in the dark, the absolute uncertainty, and the spiritual anguish wrenching. And yet, beauty is not absent from this realm. The day thirty-three men walked out of the earth alive, as Paden’s sure hand implies, was a day of miracles.
—Maurice Manning

Every life cut short deserves a memorial. These monuments, these heavy and sharp-edged poems that transport the reader to cavernous depths with the intention of excavating our capacity to remember, succeed. The poet submerges us deeper than the seven-hundred meter search for copper with these Chileans and skillfully deposits us back on the surface, all the richer, our hearts full of precious metals.
—Frank X Walker