I first learned about Chris La Tray from his part on Untrammeled Renegade Genius: Jim Harrison as Poet, which was an hour-and-a-half tribute to Jim Harrison’s poetry that featured La Tray, Colum McCann, Chris Dombrowski, and Jamie Harrison. The show was a part of the Montana Book Festival, and was originally going to feature Terry Tempest Williams—who wrote the introduction to the upcoming book, Jim Harrison: Collected Poems—but she suddenly wasn’t available and they were lucky enough to get Jim’s daughter Jamie. La Tray read some of his poetry and essays, and that was enough for me to want more of them.

This book came from his short postings online. Everything started with the one-sentence journal that he started in 2013. He writes in the book’s preface that he was inspired by one of my favorite books, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser. That was a very special correspondence between the two poets using brief poems of only two-to-five-lines. There was also Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison, again using very short poems, which was about his early morning nature walks as he recovered from radiation treatments for his cancer. The last mention of work that motivated La Tray, was Charles Finn’s collection of short essays, Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters.

One of the book’s epitaphs is by Ralph Waldo Emerson and is perfect, “You become what you think about all day long.”

I plan on rereading the book in the next few days, as I found some of the pieces as perfectly spot on. Others I found rather vague and they just never stuck the landing, but his heart is always in the right place. Considering my drawing talents, I should never criticize anyone else’s work, but the book’s drawings were rather simple and weak. There I said it. Let me now share a few of the poems that connected with me.

Snow makes her return
like a visitor who, after leaving,
returns with a knock at the door
(because she has forgotten her keys)
just as you’ve taken your pants off.
___

Stopping in a bar to meet a friend for a beer,
the televisions blare “President Trump!” this
and “President Trump!” that, and all I can wonder
is if there were ever two words less suited
to follow one after the other?
___

Walking in the earliest hours of morning,
dawn still three or four hours away,
I wander the house and peer through the blinds
at an achingly clear night,
the moon bright enough to read by,
and I’m struck by how much heart-stopping beauty
we miss because we’re sleeping.
___

I woke up to the earliest light of day
spilling across the field outside my window,
the dogs snoring in a semi-circle around the bed,
a soft, warm female under the same sheet as me,
a cool breeze from the ceiling fan above me
caressing my face, and still, STILL,
my first conscious thought was,
“I wish this town had a Waffle House.”
___

Chris La Tray is a member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians and one of this book’s reviewers said that he is, “the real deal—authentic, with a heart as wide as the big skies of Montana.” I can still see his smiling face on that tribute and hear his humorous and intelligent observations. It’s so good to learn of a new good writer, and to then watch for their next book. ( )