OYO, the Beautiful River: An environmental narrative in two parts

Mark Hamilton shares an inspiring poetic narrative of his leisurely southwesterly voyage along the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois. His dory takes him back and forth from man’s country to God’s, through complex industrial developments with their effluent waste to the natural world, the calm and quiet of nature.

Only a poet can intertwine the scenes successfully, navigate the prevailing backcloth along with personal contemplation and memories. Among pedestrian descriptive lines come sequences drawing us in closely, waking to a rooster, ‘to insects pelting the canvas,/ a blizzard of mayflies tic-ticking, massing above and around,/ nicking one another with their wings…’.

Along the way, rewarding sights contrast with shock and disappointments treated accordingly. There’s floating close to the corpse of an elderly man who wandered off, not for the first time, from his care home. And a fisherman’s pride in his boatload of eighty-pound catfish, wondering how many fries would he’d enjoy when he landed his harvest.
Oyo, the Beautiful River accomplishes an unusual protracted theme, a charming contribution to contemporary poetry.