Panning Gold

Teacher and naturalist, Patrick Stevens brings us his ruminations on a life lived in a small commuity in the northwoods. He opens the town to our view with its emblems of character and its posture. The poet styles the upbringing and growth of the individual and reviews that which lies in the distance.

Like a backwoods guide, Stevens brings us through his and our own forests, casting a tender and incisive eye over a private but burgeoning life leaving nary a print in the snow other than the frost of our own enchanted breaths.

Panning Gold is in his own words:

The poems in this collection are centered on nature, learning, recollection and remembrance. Each carries some small piece of a path through life that I carried with me to this 74th year. Many of them reflect the substance of my youth and my experiences learning about the natural world and an America now past.

Most of what is written about the 1950's and 60's concerns the turmoil of those times as our generation came of age: the bebop, hipsters, motorcycle hoods, flower power, riots in the streets, racism and war. We saw Brando and James Dean rise to fame, rock and roll heat the air waves, and the new electronic revolution of television begin to eat at our edges. We were the first teenage generation breaking with tradition and common cultural values.

My generation grew up through the cold war, nuclear testing and threats, political assassination, race riots, the Korean and Viet Nam wars; all historic bullet points for texts describing mid-century America. We were the sons and daughters of the "greatest" generation, a generation of Americans who had struggled through the Great Depression, only to be thrown into the Second World War. They were tough people, winners, our parents, and they lead us into a new world of American dominance: politically, militarily, culturally.

The beginnings of this book arose when I returned to live in my hometown after a 30 year absence. I noted significant changes in the community and the people, their prosperity and the texture of their lives. My hometown had become like every other town with a strip mall, Walmart, and franchised fast-food joints on either end of a dying main street. I began writing and recalling what had been at the beginning of my life. The great tree lined streets and magnificence of that era. Many of the poems reflect the pride we all felt with town celebrations, parades, the Fourth of July. Every small town had a high school marching band when I grew up. No longer. Over the course of a decade, I recreated those lost days by writing these poems Many relate to the community, other to the family or playing with friends. It was a different world back there, then, protected and safe in small town Midwest America were none of the historic turmoil ever really broke through to trouble us. Everyone knew who was who, what was what, and where we were all going. Our troubles were small and typical, and our lives simple and limited. There were no freeways or jets or internet or cell phones to connect us to anywhere unsettling. It was a privileged world.

We, the post war generation living our lives in our little mill town by the river were raised up well, for the most part, and safe. Until the later 1960's when the war and resistance blew up, there was nothing much to disturb our peace. That is where the better part of this book occurs. Pieces of glitter left from the detritus of a life lived well and remembered here one moment at a time.

If you have ever wished to know what life in small town, Midwest America was before the revolution of the later 1960's and 70's, before manufacturing was shipped overseas, before the Reagan revolution, before freeways and jets and fly over country was invented, this book will give you an entry into that world; the best parts of it, the gold.