I.

Among the many gifts of poetry that continue to command relevance is its ability to endow with lasting meaning the more baffling events that occur on that fantastic landscape known as human experience. It is by such creative authority that a poet like Edgar Allan Poe was able to illuminate some of the darker crevices of the human psyche, and by the same that a literary artist like James Dickey could give shape and substance to chaos taking unsettling root in the world’s collective soul. Similarly, the kind of immersion into the kingdom of nature undertaken by a poet such as Mary Oliver, and the type of creative ascension into the realms of spirituality documented by Jalaluddin Rumi, opens doors to fresh perspectives and startling visions. Sometimes these revelations come with warm thrilling inspiration that soothes one’s anxieties about the world or motivates one’s better intentions toward humanity. Sometimes they arrive with the cold lead-heavy dread of a haunting that stirs terror, fascination, and mystery. So it is in the pages of The Hanging Man Dreams, David Hightower’s profoundly accomplished debut collection of poetry.

Exactly who is this Hanging Man? How did he end up in such a situation? And how is it that he chances to dream under such precarious circumstances? He is, in fact, only partly an invention of the poet’s pen, partly a product of legends that echo through the northern hills of Georgia, and partly the stuff of whispered family history. What is known is precisely what is reported in these remarkable pages: that a man making his way home one evening is suddenly ambushed––lynched, in fact, for reasons unknown to him. Struggle proves futile as he is overwhelmed, tied up, hung from the branch of a tree, and left there to die. Because the Hanging Man in question was white and not black, the event would seem to have been motivated by something other than racial animosity. What ensues following this attack is a long horribly dark night of one man’s terrorized, weeping, and dreaming soul.

The poetry of The Hanging Man Dreams is unified less by a single theme than it is by a progression of complimentary themes, like a musical score building up from its first intriguing notes to a veritable exultation of chords and choruses. Pondering the nearly incomprehensible fate of the Hanging Man, David Hightower offers an amazing vision of what it must have been like to exist inside the spinning mind, faltering lungs, and struggling heart of a life balanced on the edge of extinction and madness. The poems that come whirling out of this spiritual chaos reveal Hightower as a poet deeply rooted in the history, ecology, folklore, and personality of his native north Georgia region at the same time that he instinctively transcends it. For sure, there is a kinship between Hightower’s literary sensibility and that of the legendary Byron Herbert Reece, but theirs is a kinship defined more by geographical proximity than poetic form, tone of voice, subject matter, or even sense of place. In that regard, Hightower shares stronger ties with another fellow Georgian: James Dickey. Both possess the very useful gift of being able to write simultaneously from the inside and outside of a given moment, as Hightower demonstrates here in “Loneliness,” the first poem at the beginning of section three:

                       Will some churchgoer find me tomorrow
                           morning,

a caricature Christ slumped in a grotesque
             crucifixion?

Will clicking tongues speculate on the sins

that hung me here?

Will the preacher use me for his sermon,

or will no one find me

until they interrupt the congregation of
                 buzzards

and investigate their holy communion?

A whippoorwill moans

the desolation of the alone.

I long to comfort it,

to comfort myself. 

                        It is too late for any passersby;

I am solitary in the night.

I pray for release

to the God that put me here;

I vow to live.

I rest against the noose.

This particular example, as do each of the poems in the first section of The Hanging Man Dreams, also illustrates Hightower’s cognizance of the whims and proclivities of nature. One could note that in this he shares an informed awareness similar to that of fellow poets Mary Oliver, Wislawa Symborska, and Gary Snyder. Or, a reader could study the deep flow of spiritual grace that moves through Hightower’s work and note a comparison to the great mystics of poetry. It is, however, perhaps best that we accept Hightower on his own capable poetic terms.

II.

Each of the five sections of The Hanging Man Dreams begins with the voice of the Hanging Man himself, bemoaning like Job the incredible injustice of the cruel fate that has befallen him. His experience, however, is not one that allows him to wallow, or dangle as it were, in the soothing comforts of self pity. While that may be his desire, his destiny is something quite different. His is the fate of those whose lives are said to flash before their eyes just prior to death, except that in place of a quick merciful rush of images ending in quiet dark cessation, the Hanging Man spends an agonizing restless night filled with unfolding memories, dreams, confessions, prayers, regrets, complex revelations, and at times more simple realizations. These sometimes vivid and sometimes hallucinatory insights pile up hopefully and despairingly in the form of poems. With each succeeding section, the Hanging Man endows with new value and significance a world and a life previously taken for granted.

As these revelations unfurl and accumulate from one section to the next, Hightower invites his readers to become witness to an expansion of suspended consciousness that is more subtly implied than it is directly stated. From the foreboding presence portrayed in “Hawk” to the frustrated impulses of domesticated chimpanzees in “Made in the Shade,” he allows that nature is indeed a mysterious force and presence, even an aggressive intelligence, with which humankind must contend. As such, it is also one to be approached with more reverence than arrogance, and more caution than disregard. With the Hanging Man’s increasing awareness of the nature surrounding him, the immediate threat to his own being remains but is somehow made less so. In “The Setting Sun,” he acknowledges the reversal of his fortunes and attempts to prepare himself for the traumas to come:

A half moon and a star

Float into my mind,

Just above the treetops,

A thought and a light;

Day is born tonight.

This dawning that comes with the night brings with it something more than a perception of imperiled mortality. It offers telling, and perhaps life-sustaining glimpses into the varied life that animates the character of nature. It brings with it such observations as that of a tree that “leans back like a little old man/ who can laugh” in the poem, “Pine”; and that of creatures that “flicker like shadows of light/ through columns of silence,” in “The Deer.”

 Hightower’s transition from the natural environment illustrated in section one, to that of history and folklore represented in section two, mirrors the history of life as we know it. As the Hanging Man discovers “the value of patience/ and the absence of time,” the poet displays some of his most insightful and compelling work. In the brooding and brutal “Chickamauga 1863,” we come upon an unexpected battle so fierce that “Boots nor bare feet can climb/ the hills slippery with sacrifice.” The sense of place and souls throughout, rooted in time as well as timelessness, reveals itself in “Listen” as a hidden aspect of identity for, “We, the mixed threads and remnants/ of those long gone.” Whereas the land and the history it carries might previously have served as little more than a setting for the human presence it accommodated, it becomes for the Hanging Man a living extension of that presence. 

With the snapshots and detailed portraits of childhood memories, family members, and neighbors framed in section three, the progression and evolution of the Hanging Man’s story grows more refined even while the Hanging Man himself dreams that he, “sprouts wings, tumbles and whirls/ through the air.” On this flight of mind and spirit soaring through the past, we meet a wise and adored grandmother in the poem, “Peppermint Witch”; and in “Grandfather Ghost,” a beloved patriarch who, “dreamed his death/ just before I dreamed my birth.” Are these just memories and hallucinations shaped into poems or might they even be spectral visitations come to restore the strength draining so rapidly from the Hanging Man? Hightower leaves the window of possibilities open.  The wisdom and integrity of a proud father, the kind assurance of gentle aunts and uncles, and the antics of a favored cousin remind the Hanging Man of all that his life has been but may never become again.

Although steeped in the blood and fond emotions of kinship, Hightower’s lyrical narrative poems of family ties go beyond the quaintness of a northern Georgian’s photo album to deliver scenes intensely universal in their depth of human longing for renewed hope and distant realities. Through the trained discipline of the poet’s pen, it becomes something of a thrilling “hoot” to join the young narrator of “How a Hillbilly Finds the Blues” as he parks in his newly-acquired 1954 Ford to listen to blues master Muddy Waters and:

 
                        “…drink, smoke the night away,

watch the full moon float across the sky    

through sandpaper eyes that only tears can
                soothe,

look over horizons, real and mythical,

realize there are those I’ll never reach.”

The Hanging Man observes at the beginning of section four that, “My world spins away from all direction, /neither up nor down.” His world, in fact, continues to slowly implode, booming as loudly and painfully from the mental despair on the inside as he is from the physical agony on the outside.  His remembrance of family expands to embrace that of the greater human family in the form of community. The experience of life extends itself to include the reality and inevitability of death. This wider spectrum of what it means for human beings to belong to each other beyond the ties of blood is rendered in poems alternately stunning in their brevity and absorbing in their extensiveness. All tend to be equal in the wealth of their compassion for those overburdened with the sorrows of sudden loss, the bewilderment of social isolation, the happily blind passions of youth, the trials of old age, and the victories of human imagination. Though it may not be the first inclination of most to welcome such characters as Hightower’s “Tsycho Brahe,” “Whirlygig King,” and “Old Lady at the New Grocery Store,” the poet illustrates they are nevertheless very real and very much a living part of the story that gives any single life its truest meaning.

The final section of The Hanging Man Dreams answers a crucial question: namely, what is the ultimate fate of the Hanging Man? Do his dreams carry him into that deeper longer sleep known as death? Does he somehow manage to escape? Does his suffering go on endlessly? There can be, at this extraordinary book’s end, little doubt that Hanging Man’s odyssey of anguish and bewilderment has forced him to change:

                                                THE HANGING MAN 9

Invisible prophets, pursued by darkness,

rush through the treetops.

Silence, stillness.

Morning light races back

to the shelter of the horizon.

Lightning, thunder.

My lips purse like an infant’s

to suckle the sky;

my tongue laps at the ecstasy of raindrops.

Jagged light carves

a new world each second;

explosions signal their destruction.

Grain by grain my foundation

dissolves to liquid.

I am left suspended within a choked breath.

I can do no more;

death no longer frightens me.

Lightning, thunder.

Behind clinched eyes my vision sizzles.

A tree of light.

Silence, stillness.

Whatever his fate, he thinks and speaks now with the tongue of someone who has tasted something numinous, something holy, and is left to make whatever sense of it he can. Whether in body or spirit or both, Hightower’s Hanging Man enters a state of being where language determines priorities and truth redefines life-saving significance through the devices of joyful rhythm, brilliant imagery, sacred passion, and healing metaphor.

By Aberjhani

With poetry excerpts by David Hightower