Trailside Register/ poems by Richard Parisio/ book review by Raphael Kosek

Trailside Register/ poems by Richard Parisio/ book review by Raphael Kosek/                 
Bushwack Books 2025    

	As all hikers know, a trailside register is where you write your name and where you’re headed in case you run into trouble or go missing. Each of Parisio’s poems is a register of where he’s been—moments of wonder, sadness, and isolation along the metaphorical journey as well as the actual one. His poems explore absence and presence, what is lost and what is retained. His keen and lyric observations include his encounters with flora and fauna.  He is the sharpest observer as the opening poem, “Growing up in Brooklyn,” reveals. As a boy he “lived / by looking and looking led [him] on” as he focuses on a snail in the city.  The adult observer is keenly aware that between absence and presence, there is always the moment in between, that brief stop as he makes eye contact with an eight-point buck “who met my gaze / unstartled . . . as the garden / held the two of us / alone. Or did it hold / the whole world / in that moment just before / all things dissolve / into the velvet dusk.”
	Parisio’s poems telescope seamlessly between the eloquently observed right in front of him and the philosophical. In “Isolation Blues,” he says, “When I look up / again the gray lake’s rippled and the swan / along with her only mate—her doubled self—/ have lifted off, are gone. What color? / What color is alone?” In the poem, “Absence,” someone or something is addressed as “taking its leave” and the last stanza offers a response from the one who remains: “I keep moving till a swan sails into view, its ship of silence / composed of crescent moons. Its whiteness answers / something in the air. / I am the question.” 
	In a favorite poem of mine, “It’s a Jungle,” the images move from “leaf buds bulging / green are noses thumbed / at the fading winter grasses,” to “A teen with skinny legs / ball cap and gothic tats” blasting a boombox to the speaker admitting, “. . .no you can’t / get away from it all, / You are afraid / your parents will die soon / something whispers as the pines / release their temple incense, / You are afraid they will live forever.”  And yes, he gets it right regarding the way our emotions vacillate on such weighty concerns. In “Deer Tick,” he turns the current bane of our existence into a scathing metaphor of retribution:
                                                                                                                                          

		“. . . Now we watch our step
		not out of love but fear, like tyrants
		of a kingdom bristling with rebellion. Hidden
I		n plain view are these live sparks of that same
		greedy fire that threatens to consume us . . .
				Our sins, how we try
		to brush them off. How they cling to us.”

There is always the awareness of mortality as in “At Sixty-Five”: “A pair of great black wings—a vulture / flaps over my head. With a smile / I answer his question.” And immortality of sorts in “The Inchworm”: “It seemed to take a lifetime / for its crossing as he watched / it bunch and stretch its tasseled / length, measuring forever what was measureless.”  Parisio’s poems do exactly that: they show us that what is beautiful and natural is ultimately, “measureless” and we should be all be grateful creatures to be part of this world.

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Richard Parisio worked for twenty-five years as an environmental educator in the Catskills and Hudson Valley for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He also wrote a weekly nature column for the New Paltz Times. He has taught thousands of children and adults about everything from ants to monarch butterflies to John Burroughs, the Catskills nature writer and friend of Walt Whitman and Theodore Roosevelt. Parisio’s earlier poetry chapbook is The Owl Invites Your Silence.

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Reviewer Raphael Kosek 
Raphael Kosek’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry East, Catamaran, and many other journals.  Her chapbook, Rough Grace, won the 2014 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Prize. She won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review’s poetry contest and Eastern Iowa Review’s 2016 nonfiction prize.  American Mythologywas recently released from Brick Road Poetry Press. She teaches English at Marist College where her students keep her real. She is the 2019-2020 Dutchess County Poet Laureate.                                                                                                             
 rakosek75@gmail.com