NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

In his Introduction to BEAR CROSSING Kell Robertson teases out the role his life's experiences have played in his writing. He says,

This little selection of poems was put together from the scraps of paper found in the bottom of my old tin suitcase. ... I like this book because it somehow says in a very few words what I've been trying to say over a lot of years.

Someone once said that you shouldn't use poetry to tell a story, but Robertson chooses to ignore this. Robertson writes about people and places. It's his forte. His poems convey a sense of landscape and human players: odd characters that he came across when he was working in a day work place called Labour Force in Ocala, Florida, and journeying throughout the U.S.

The characters peopling Robertson's poems are tended with a sensitivity and humour involving not a little compassion. Tended with humility too — or maybe it's just the wariness of someone who is an outsider. In the title poem, BEAR CROSSING, whilst he is

	Flagging traffic for a road crew

	The flagman at the other end said 
	he saw the bear too and, over a hot dog, 
	and a cold sodapop at noon told me 
	he wished he'd had his gun boy he'd
	have shot the sonofabitch right in
	the belly, her guts all over the
	road. 

	the blood on my boot this morning
	as thick as the sky up there.

	Popping open a hot beer at dawn
	out on the desert, coughing up
	and spitting remnants of
	tobacco stained dreams,
	very real granite gravel
	grinding into my knees as I
	fry stolen bacon in an iron skillet
	over a fire made of dry
	popping driftwood, my friend's
	gentle mare chomping, snorting
	down the dry wash where
	I tethered her.

	Newberry barefooted
	in tennis shoes with
	holes in the toes
	walks across the street
	to the store for beer
	clutching the exact change.

	Newberry reels
	in a drunken dance
	to crush beercans
	to supplement
	his social security
	in the back yard.

	We sit around
	our small fire
	drink whiskey
	and tell stories
	making ourselves
	into legendary figures.

	My friend Jimmie
	a Hopi
	gathers his pennies
	and buys us
	Tokay 
	and we drink it
	under the cut bank
	of the Rio Grande
	he throws the three
	extra pennies
	into the river

	We were not allowed to take off
	our shirts and it was a quarter
	of a mile down the road to take
	a piss behind the big pile of mulch
	in the glade.  The owner came home
	in the afternoon, got out of his Rolls
	and glared at us as if we were
	some kind of necessary insects
	on his prize winning lawn.

	Saturday nights were fine to Thunderlip Jones
	nobody called him worthless while they were laughing
	& he went out into a world of Saturday nights
	learned the loneliness of empty stages
	skid row hotels, bars in the afternoon sun
	after or before the crowd
	empty feelings when the song is done
	but he continued to sing

It's a kind of beat biography of my own absurd self,

A mix of myth and reality that I will probably never publish in its entirety.

	After I eat
	I will walk
	back to town
	and get drunk and ride
	the high lonesome
	again.

	buck toothed but wonderful
	in their bright flowersack dresses

	never stopped talking
	(never said much) but
	never stopped talking

	on her plump thigh

	husband makes faces
	out of dried apples

	over the cash register

	ragged burial ground

	prophylactics
	a pair of dirty yellow panties
	and a half pint bottle of Jim Beam,
	all empty

	a gringa
	from Kansas

	"You don't fool me," she says, "We're both hustlers.
	I hustle for money and drugs —
	you hustle for these words of yours."

Robertson shuns the off-the-rack constraints of conventional verse to suit himself; perhaps — even to have fun. With him, there's an itch, the background stuff he can't discard, the simple normative experience of someone who thinks and records. An honest and insightful attempt to see into the hearts and minds of his fellows and a need to capture the essence of heartland America is what I take from BEAR CROSSING.