Poet Clint Bowman’s latest collection explores modern-day life in Appalachia

Editor’s note: This article was written before Tropical Storm Helene. 

Local poet Clint Bowman and I arrive at the dirt parking lot at the base of Appalachian Way road in Montreat around 9:45 a.m.  We’re there to hike Brushy Mountain and discuss his latest collection, If Lost.

The book of poems, which is divided into three sections, is both a love letter to and a lament over Appalachia. A series of works where interstate traffic rushes past forgotten towns; where blue jays make nests out of styrofoam and cigarette cartons; and where, despite the odds, nature still finds small and occasional victories.

It is the poet’s interest in the natural world that led me to suggest that we meet for a hike. Originally from Davidson County, a region just south of Winston-Salem, Bowman relocated to Black Mountain in 2019 to join the town’s Parks and Recreation Department. He says he liked the idea of living in the mountains and envisioned a seamless transition from one rural part of the state to another.

But things didn’t quite work out the way he’d hoped. He initially lived close to the interstate. The incessant sound of traffic, he says, was foreign to him. “Where I grew up was very quiet,” he says. “And that’s kind of what I’ve been trying to work toward since moving here.”

As we begin our ascent, Bowman tells me the trail is one of his favorites because “no one’s hardly ever on it.”

‘Establish Your Bearings’

Among its many recurring settings, the interstate is prominent in If Lost, especially within the collection’s opening section, “Establish Your Bearings.” Across multiple poems, characters are often daydreaming about the past as they drive down the highway or stand alongside it.

In one of the section’s most devastating and disturbing pieces, “Routine,” a truck driver settles in for the night inside his cab. Before going to bed, he calls his ex-wife, leaving her a 15-minute voicemail recalling the good times in between accusations and expletives. By the poem’s end, it is evident that this episode is not a one-off but a ritual.

Meanwhile, the book’s opening poem, “Ghost Town,” captures the tension that embodies much of the collection — the love and despair characters carry with them over their communities. In its opening three stanzas, Bowman writes:

“I prefer this old town
where there are plenty
of ghosts to haunt you.

Where history
whispers in your ear
to not repeat a word it says.

Nature cracks through pavement
and climbs though storefronts—
all the poems are there,
but no one cares.”

‘Notice Nature’

Back on the trail, Bowman continues to discuss the influence of highway traffic on both his work and his living situation. Five years into his stint in Black Mountain, he and his wife, B, have found a place farther away from Interstate 40.

“We can still hear little whispers,” he says, as we pass through a tunnel of rhododendron. “Our next place has to be completely away on the other side of the mountain.”

The collection’s second section, “Notice Nature,” is where Bowman’s empathy toward the natural world shines.

In writing these particular poems, he says, “I had a realization of the parallels between the human struggle and the environmental struggle and how we’re all going through it.”

One of Bowman’s many talents as a poet is his surprising and impactful use of personification. For example, in “Act Natural,” he writes “The power company/gave the oak tree/a lobotomy.” In “Detox,” city storm drains become beer funnels “for our drunken creeks.” And in “Throw Me Back” he cautions readers, “If you bushwhack/the woods will bite back.”

As a poet, he is also skillful in addressing environmental concerns without being heavy-handed or didactic. In “Killing the Game,” for instance, he offers a moving hypothesis for why so much wildlife is spotted dangerously close to busy highways.

In the poem’s final stanza, he writes:

“I keep telling my mother
we don’t give animals enough credit.
When they sit on the shoulder
and stare into traffic,
they’re not scared or confused —
just pushed to their limits.”

Meanwhile, in “False Spring,” the poet disorients readers in a thrilling way, as they follow a pair of hikers who stumble upon a bear den and begin tossing rocks inside it. The pair, standing above the mossy crag, manage to draw the cubs out, followed soon thereafter by the drowsy mother.

As the adult bear emerges, readers experience both frustration and concern for the foolish hikers. But by the poem’s end, Bowman shifts perspective, offering the mother bear’s take on the situation, seeing these humans as nothing more than “tiny trespassers/that buzz about/these mountains/like mosquitos/struggling to find their worth.”

‘Don’t Be Afraid’

Whereas interstates and nature dominate the first two sections of If Lost, the third and final portion, “Don’t Be Afraid,” weaves the collection together through its more direct meditations on death, regret and moments of connection.

In “Mother’s Veins,” a woman and her grown son discuss the death of a relative, whose body is discovered inside his home bathroom, three days after a snowstorm. It’s 2 a.m. when the mother finally opens up to her child about the loss. And midway through the poem, Bowman writes:

“We walked outside
to shrink ourselves
against the stars.

The coyotes by the creek
offered their condolences,
and we cried with them.”

This particular line about the coyotes, Bowman says as we reach the Brushy Mountain overlook, is among his favorites from the collection.

It is around 10:30 a.m. The view, while slightly hazy, is nevertheless expansive and striking. I ask Bowman what we’re looking out onto.

He peels the skin off a mandarin and considers the view. “So this is another reason why I love this hike so much,” he says. “It’s so undeveloped. This is basically a big swath of Pisgah National Forest, down to Old Fort.”

It is, unsurprisingly, quiet up here. The sort of space Bowman would naturally be drawn to. He goes on to note that the land itself is all protected. “It’s pretty untouched,” he says, still looking over the mountain range. “So you don’t see any [developments].”

We continue to discuss aspects of his writing as well as his work with Dark City Poets Society, which Bowman launched alongside fellow writer Melisa Pressley in January 2020. The group meets twice a month in Black Mountain for free workshops and readings.

Then we head back down the trail, and I ask the question that I always kind of hate asking fellow writers — what they hope readers will take away from their work. It’s the sort of question that implies a piece of writing can and should be distilled into a single message or emotion, which Bowman and I both agree is antithetical to the work.

Still, he considers a message that readers might take away from If Lost.

“I hope that people who read it feel less alone,” he says. “I think that’s the ultimate goal. Everything and everybody is going through it, and I feel like as long as we understand that, it makes life easier and less lonely.”