Reviews of Lake County Diamond

Similarly, a blurb on Tim Hunt’s book states: “These poems in the big wind.” Lake County Diamond is perhaps the most elegant chapbook I have ever come across. Intertext deserves applause for their care of a small poetic product like this, as as the larger books they produce. Hunt, as a poet, is stunning:

Why the Land Is Red

Old miners say
the cinnabar
but the ore’s smelted,
the retort’s scrapped. All
that’s left
are bleached shacks
and the rust
of old bumpers.
The land must eat.

Hunt mines his small part of Northern California for the images of a living record of man’s struggle with the land and vice-versa. This is sincere, precious poetry!

Gary Sheldon, from his review of four chapbooks (Ice River, 1988)

*

Another of Intertext’s offerings in 1986 was Lake County Diamond by Tim Hunt. Solidly rooted in the land, Hunt’s work is as much a thanksgiving as it is a poetic description of his family’s history. Superbly blending a love of the land with the lessons of mortality, Lake County Diamond is an elegant mix of the sublime with the mundane. Take, for instance, “Why the Land Is Red”:

Old miners say
the cinnabar
but the ore’s smelted,
the retort’s scrapped. All
that’s left
are bleached shacks
and the rust
of old bumpers.
The land must eat.

Hunt is adept at using the land and natural phenomenon to illustrate a human reality. Note, for example, the elegant use of the term and image “cemetery weeds” in “Star Thistle”:

Land this empty nothing grows well
except the cemetery weeds—
star thistle so sharp it goes
right through the boot

In “Irma’s Elegy,” hunt uses rust normally an image of slow decay as an image of speed. And in the same stanza of the same poem, Hunt uses weeds again as a symbol of mortality.

In the yard of her empty house
the abandoned steam tractor flames rust.
The weed pods stand empty of seed
stiff like hands that neither open nor close

If there is any one word which describes Hunt’s work, that word is “crystalline.” The vision is pure and undistorted and, like Hunt’s poetry, comes from the earth.

Steve C. Levi, from his review of three Intertext chapbooks (Small Press Review, August 1987)

*

We feel more comfortable with Tim Hunt’s Lake County Diamond. The Lake County is next to ours here in California (Mount Konocti is in it, after which we named Konocti Books). This is a very short chapbook—only 12 poems, handset by John Laursen of Portland, Oregon, but the poems are rooted in their region, which we know: star thistle and red earth. The “diamonds” of the title poem are only quartz, “washed down from the high country / where that flash would mean a nearby hill / and a cream vein with gold twisted through / like a drool of blood.” The author evidently grew up in the county, his grandparents pioneers (we have many writers now who grew up on city streets, never knowing or caring where their ancestors came from). Sun and stone and old skin inhabit these poems.

Noel Peattie, from his review of a set of chapbooks (Sipapu, 1986)

*

Tim Hunt’s Lake County, California, is filled with rocks, weed stalks and red soil. There’s “so much space to fill with the human” because human projects wither and die. The locals confront a “boom failed, a marriage dried to cold sheets and a stiff back.” Yet, through sheer will the land’s “diamonds” can be grasped, the worthless quartz chunks

that splinter into a promise we could
still move, yet hold, were we to eat
the bread of crystal and drink
the blood of light.

Or as Hunt admits proudly:

Vaccinated with star thistle
we have endured.

…. Poetic practice follows theme and place imperatives. Tim Hunt’s elegies and commemoratives are compact, crystalline in edge and weight. His values are scratched from the social and natural red earth of home. The poetry is from one mine, as his diction reveals his interests: patterns, bounds, rule, will hold, mean, keep….

Tensions that make these poets credible stem from the paradoxes of their dreams and defenses. How does one defend against a harsh land, a dying family? If Tim Hunt must fight, he defends himself by turning the land’s threats into vehicles of his fantasy. The star-thistle “so sharp it goes right through the boot” vaccinates natives and becomes the proudly-earned “sharp crown.” The worthless quartz, used for borders between home and scrub, is truly diamond.

Erik Muller, from “Persons in Poems: Two Intertext Chapbooks” (Publishing NW, 1987)