A Possible Bag

Following the trail he set out on in From the Arapaho Songbook, the poems in Andrew Schelling’s A Possible Bag takes us further into the recesses of the Southern Rocky Mountain bioregion, tracking the remnants of the Arapaho language that was once the native tongue of that terrain. “Translator, scholar, poet Andrew Schelling works from linguistic roots both East (Sanskrit) and West (Arapaho) to imagine how we might relate to earth differently since we can now see human inhabitation as a limited engagement. According to the glossary, a “possible bag” is a sack for holding anything. These poems hold a miscellany of prized items: vocabularies, vistas, verses, dreams, love tokens, bones, beadwork, weathers, flora, fauna, landmarks, pottery, books, rants, maps, dates, medicines, jerked meat and letters. The poet allows himself to be moved by each encounter and does not place his emotion outside the range of this lapidary writing. Flashes of feeling illuminate the lines connecting facts of geography, history, botany and 21st century social life. Here is an engaged mindfulness both personal and planetary.” Kit Robinson