Rolling the Sun
by Julia Older
Appledore Books, 79 pages

I can walk through one of the poems in Julia Older’s new book and come out on the other side.

“How I wish to walk out of this place,
far out where the air suddenly turns color
and plants exude their nighttime odor,
and animals with luminous eyes prowl the dark,
instill a real and natural fear.
Out past the billboards and roads
where men live who have thought
only of their vegetables and chickens,
where the only teacher is the sun, rain, blight, death.

Come, let us walk together out,
far out of this place.
I know you do not believe it
but it’s true. This city ends.”

I may not know exactly where “this place” is for Older, who makes her home in rural Hancock. But I know the feeling. I too have wanted to go “out past the billboards and roads.” The poems in “Rolling the Sun” are accessible.

This is important to many of us. If we are not poets, or critics of poetry, we want to emerge from a poem carrying something more than a foggy head.

And by the way, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover. “Rolling the Sun” has a metaphysical-looking angel on the cover—something that brings up thoughts more of mysticism than of mountains. But the poems in this book are about place.

Older has spent many of her years outside this country, including eight years during the Vietnam era in Italy, France, Brazil and Mexico. While in Italy, she met poets Ezra Pound and Salvatore Quasimodo. While in Mexico, she studied in a fellowship at San Miguel D’Allende. But “Rolling the Sun” is about places nearer to home, about thoughts and sensations that grow from the landscapes of New England.

As Older says in the intro, they “resonate with places that have seeped into my pores. They bear witness to recent journeys and map the lay of the land. From Webhannet Marsh I bring back clam shells—and poems. From Mount Monadnock I return with blisters—and poems.”

Older has written 25 books, including eight books of poetry and many books with her partner, Steve Sherman. Her first book was published in 1976, “Appalachian Odyssey,” which included her poems and grew out of her hike of the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail. In 2000, she published a book-length poem called “Hermaphroditus in America,” which in a satirical fashion explores the male and females sides of all of us through modern day and mythological characters traveling through the underbelly of America.

Older’s sole published novel is “Island Queen” (1997), a fictional account of the life of poet Celia Thaxter, who lived on the Isles of Shoals. She and Sherman are well-known for their nature walk guide books published by the Appalachian Mountain Club. The most recent, “Nature Walks Along the Seacoast” is what currently puts food on the couple’s table.

But each of them has other loves as well. Sherman writes mysteries (three published so far) and Older writes poems—always has and always will.

She writes every day, sometimes for long, sometimes not so long, sometimes fiction or poetry, sometimes non-fiction. She writes the non-fiction mainly to support her fiction habit. Lately, the balance has been more to her liking.

“I write everyday, sometimes into the night,” Older said in a phone interview. “More and more, my poetry has taken over.”

To other young poets, she suggests, “Just pay attention, observe or even just read your favorite poets. That can put you on the path to your voice.” She insists that finding a personal voice is critical.

“Voice is very important. Otherwise you’re just sounding like some school. A lot of people out there just sound like someone else.”

As far as Older is concerned, writing and life are all one.

“My life is my writing—and the voice I write in.”