Before I Forget

Before I Forget is a collection of poems by Dr. Lloyd Jacobs. His is a familiar name in the academic circles in the United States. He served as the 16th president of the University of Toledo. He is also a former vascular surgeon.

A disclaimer: between 2007 and 2016 I served on the Board of Trustees of the University of Toledo. During much of that time Dr. Jacobs served as president of the university. As such I, along with other eight members of the Board had a supervisory and fiduciary responsibility for the University. This positive review is based on a deeper study of his poetry and not on my friendship with him.

It is a delightful small volume in which the poet looks with a discerning eye at everything in his surroundings and in simple words connects the dots between seemingly disparate things and makes them a coherent whole.

The book is in three parts. The poems in the first part are about the land, seasons, harvest, neighbors, small animals and such written from the perspective of a farmer that Dr. Jacobs has been most of his life. Parts two and three are titled respectively “Memory is a Wild Creature” and “Prayer and Blasphemy”.

While the poems in the later two parts have a philosophical bend and deal with subjects of prayer, melancholy, old age and death, the poems in the first part are mostly about the land and a farmer’s relationship with it.

I see a parallel between Dr. Jacobs’s poetry and the paintings of the famous American artist Andrew Wyeth. Like Wyeth, Jacobs celebrates the ordinary and makes them look extraordinary. In so many ways Chadds Ford in rural Pennsylvania where Wyeth grew up and the Ridge near Britton, Michigan, where Jacobs has farmed for more than forty years, are closely connected. It is nature’s intricate tapestry that both the artist and the poet find fascinating and worthy of celebration.

In the poem “Gravedigger” the poet laments the arrival of diesel backhoe to take away the livelihood of his neighbour Samuels. He laments:

Nonagenarian Samuels, just across the ridge

Was a digger of graves his entire life

Until the Diesel backhoe took his livelihood

and the current written code of specifications

of length and width and drainage

removed all traces of artistry from the work

Jacobs’s Samuels could be Waino Mattson in Wyeth’s 1950 painting “The Sexton”.

Just as Wyeth celebrated the mundane and the ordinary with paint and brush, Jacobs does that with well-chosen words to weave a simple but beautiful landscape of rural Michigan. He writes about the snowstorms, the spring thaw, death of an old possum, neighbors, Grandma’s Poultice and above all his enduring love for his wife Ola. One can feel the love expressed in these simple words:

Did I tell you when you sensed my presence and turned

Our love surged to fill the space between us?

In his 1961 painting Distant Thunder, Wyeth captured his wife Betsy napping at the edge of the woods. It was the fulfillment of his wish to paint his wife picking blueberries. The depiction of their life partners is evident in Jacobs’s words and Wyeth’s paint.

In “Willow Tree”, Jacobs mourns the dying of the tree that he and his wife Ola had planted:

The moment was portentous: we planted it,

Ola and I, its blessed shade and beauty

Gave a fixedness to the torrents of our lives.

Now our own lives contained the life span

of an ancient willow tree. We wept at its fall

and railed against time and wind and rain.

And he remembers and celebrates his long past neighbors. In the poem Neighbors he recalls their eccentricities and their peculiarities. Nothing escapes his discerning eye, not even a large hernia of one of his neighbors:

Albert Purdy stood

With proprietary air

At the drilling of our well

His hernia distorting his shirt front.

And he concludes the poem :

All these have died

In the forty years we’ve lived here.

We belong here now

Where death is on familiar ground.

A poem he wrote for his wife Ola summarizes their love in the backdrop of their working farm:

Geese and sparrows begin their assembly

Well before the rains of autumn cool the air,

To catechize their young about the journey.

But what survival advantage can be conveyed

By the ancient love we hold for one another,

Compelling as the hazard of their trek?

I side with those who say our lives are dealt

With blindly by material law. How then account

For our steadfastness and constancy

The author is donating the proceeds from this book to charity. Contact him for more details: lloyd.jacobs@utoledo.edu

Dr. Sayed Amjad Hussain holds Emeritus professorships in Humanities and cardiovascular surgery at the University of Toledo, USA. He is also an op-ed columnist for Toledo Blade and daily Aaj of Peshawar.

Contact: aghaji@bex.net