THE MOUNTAIN KEEPS ITS OWN TIME: POEMS AND PHOTOGRAPHS FROM WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Joe Beckham’s The Mountain Keeps Its Own Time: Poems and Photographs from Western North Carolina grows out of a lifelong practice of paying close attention to landscape, to memory, and to the quiet movements that shape a life. A retired professor of higher education policy, Beckham turns here to poetry as his primary medium, bringing with him a sensibility formed by years of teaching, writing, and public service, as well as an earlier life spent in the outdoors as a climber, fishing guide, and Outward Bound instructor. The poems are rooted in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where ridges, rivers, and weather are not simply background but active presences—shaping perception, testing resilience, and offering moments of clarity that resist easy explanation.
Throughout the collection, Beckham pairs poems with the photographs of Skip Sickler that deepen and extend the work, inviting the reader to enter both the visual and emotional terrain of Western North Carolina. These are not grand, declarative landscapes but lived-in places: trails half-hidden by rhododendron, rivers rising and receding with the seasons, rock faces that demand attention and trust. The poems often dwell in thresholds—the moment before understanding arrives, the pause between lightning and thunder, the quiet after loss, suggesting that meaning is rarely announced and more often discovered in passing.
Written in retirement, this book reflects a deliberate turning toward what remains when professional roles fall away: the discipline of noticing, the willingness to sit with uncertainty and the recognition that time, like the mountain, moves according to its own measure. Beckham’s work is shaped by both experience and restraint, seeking not to explain the world but to meet it with clarity, humility, and a steady, attentive gaze.

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