This is Ivan Doig

"This is Ivan Doig"
April 2000

I've become a fan of Ivan Doig. I'd never heard of him until a year ago when a friend of mine loaned me a book titled; "This House of Sky". I wasn't really into reading at the time. For quite awhile I'd become a non reader after graduate school burned me out on anything in print. Radio, TV, records, tapes, videos, that was my fare. But a few books would come along that were must reads and I'd submerge into them for a time. Usually it was some kind of "practical" tome like The Road Less Traveled or a spiritually oriented book like Seven Arrows or a look at sad pages of US History in Bury my Heart at wounded Knee, a book I could never finish, or a total immersion in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

But a novel? Never.

Early in my life as a reader I'd spent a good deal of time in books by Russian authors. I read them for style more than content I suppose, but I did love the blend of both in the writings of Turgenev and Chekov. Later, a Texas writer named Elroy Bode caught the rhythm of my soul and I devoured his autobiographical books about a sense of place in the hill country of Texas like crackers and cheese.

But when I began to write seriously....or when I began to try to write seriously, I stopped reading other writers because I wanted to develop my own style without the bleed-over that might occur if I became enamored with one I admired.

I thought of novels as junk food and I was on a "healthy" diet of information only. So up shows this friend of mine with this book by this guy with a strange name; Ivan Doig. It sat for a long time on my table, a thick book that billed itself as "A lyrical evocation of the Doig's gallantly hardscrabble existence and love for the unforgiving Montana mountains."

I've been to Montana. Nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
Not even in a book. But the thing sat there and I really couldn't return it unread. I was going to have to at least skim it.

But it proved unskimmable. To make sense of page two, page one had to be read. Chapter Two leaned back on Chapter One for logical support and at the same time led one to Chapter Three like the wind up of a pitcher led
seamlessly to the next pitch. Before long, but not without many, many pauses to reflect on the wonder of this mans use of the language and subsequent reports of my experience of his incredible poetry to Elizabeth, I had finished the book.

I've got a lot to do just to keep our place in humming order so I don't like to get immersed in on-going dramas whether they be TV serials or our kids territorial squabbles. I certainly don't want to get sucked into a big book or worse, a series of books.

But listen to this. This is Ivan Doig: "Any bloodline is a carving river and
parents are its nearest shores. At the Faulkner Creek ranch I had leaned to
try out my mother's limits by running as fast as I could down the sharp shale slope of the ridge next to the ranch house. How I ever found it out without cartwheeling myself to multiple fractures is a mystery, but the avalanche angle of that slope was precisely as much plunge as I could handle as a headlong four-and-five-year-old. The first time my visiting grandmother saw one of my races with the law of gravity, she refused ever to watch again.

Even my father, with his survivor's-eye view from all the times life had banged him up, even he was given pause by those vertical dashes of mine, tyke roaring drunk on momentum. But my mother let me risk. Watched out her kitchen window my every wild down hiller, hugged herself to bruises while doing so, but let me. Because she knew something of what was ahead? Can it have been that clear to her, that reasoned? The way I would grow up, after, was contained in those freefall moments down that shale-bladed slope. In such plunge, if you use your ricochets right, you steal a kind of balance for yourself; you make equilibrium moment by moment because you have to. Amid the people and places I was to live with, I practiced that bouncing equilibrium and carried it on into a life of writing, freefalling through the language."

This wondrous word painting of a fine writer being born of body beginnings was taken from Ivan Doigs book; Heart Earth, a title that comes from this observation; "..heart and earth don't have much of a membrane between them. Sometimes decided on grounds as elusive as that single transposable h, this matter of sitting ourselves. Of a place mysteriously insisting itself into us."

Well, I'm hooked. So much so that like my friend, I'm moved to entrap others into this prose poets magical word world. That's why I thought I'd tell you about Ivan knowing as I do about my and your love for the mountains and those fine and wild freefalling moments on a life of shale slopes.

Damn! I think I've fallen in love again.

Coyote On Coyote - More about Coyote by Dick Prosapio

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