Stephen Lewandowski is a patient wordsmith, a soil conservationist and watershed advocate who has for several decades been gifting us with poems that chart the natural history and human history of the Finger Lakes region in a way no one else could. As the subtitle suggests,
these are “Poems from the Field,” from the open field of the page, the cultivated field of the field. As well as poems from an experienced storyteller with a twinkle in the telling. “Ground Truth” is what we find, as Whitman knew, under our boot soles, if we know how to read its evidence.

The poems herein do investigate the local ground the poet walks and tends, in the village of Rushville, NY, near Canandaigua Lake. Readers will discover poems about tending a cabbage patch, composting, tree planting, the best way to tread a muddy garden (using planks), but also an ode to Munsell’s Book of Soil Color, an elegy for a local beekeeper, and an account of a 17th century Dutch ancestor, a bridge-and-mill builder, killed in an encounter with Esopus Indians near Kingston, NY.

There are childhood memories and sketches of townsfolk: the author’s first job, at a Sherwin- Williams paint store, his non-English-speaking Polish grandmother, his Uncle Butch’s penchant for neatness, the restoration of an alcoholic great uncle’s chair, a boyhood near-drowning, the author visiting Salzburg with a boys’ choir, enamored of “a small woman with a large harp,” the local auto shop’s “swirl of action,” Jesse who cleans the local cinema and “explains the theory of / dunking brooms in the john,” and a very small Mennonite boy driving a tractor “trailing a huge gooseneck mower.”

There are nature epiphanies: an owl at dawn, a smooth polished stone turned up by a backhoe, “kept in the dark 10,000 years,” spring’s sudden appearance with shadblow blooming and, deep in the woods, “Gilliflower’s glow / lights the interior faintly / for a week while / Shakespeare tells us / the little people / dance and sing / in a ring, in a ring.” And the haiku-like, “Ancient Pear Tree”:

Isn’t it something
That gnarled old lady
with her hair full of flowers

Poems of Eros as well, a lover, “Drenched / from the shower / straight into my arms / for a kiss and then out again.” A musing on “What became of those postcards” sent to a past lover. A brief encounter with beauty in a coffee shop. A peach tree wand blooming in his bedroom, gift of an absent lover.

Poems of looking back, homages to a favorite teacher and poet friends now gone, or taking a “sentimental journey” after fifty years to his old school in Pennsylvania, remembering a deceased classmate from French class, “putting our heads together to know the pleasure / of French coming from / our mouths in wreaths of smoke / smoking our pipes together through / a mild haze of Balzac from the back of the room.”

And environmental laments for a burning planet, for shade maples thoughtlessly cut down, for a hill sacrificed as quarry, for “large tracts / logged off / hillside and top / cut logs piled you / see the stacks / of bright butt / ends from / the valley.”

The concluding poem, “How I Became a Shaman,” is an intriguing tale of possible witchcraft that demonstrates the author’s respectful appreciation of Iroquois culture, as well as his sense of the consciousness implicit in nature.

The short poem “Get /A Life” sums up the author’s philosophy:
Go ahead, play
it your way
but I want
to leave as
small a mark
as possible.

We are fortunate, indeed, that this goal did not preclude publishing at least sixteen poetry books and chapbooks, plus a couple of non-fiction books. Ground Truth: Poems from the Field is a most satisfying addition to Stephen Lewandowski’s canon. It demonstrates that, tilled by a serious poet, the local ground will repeatedly yield new fruit, and not a few surprises.

John Roche lives in Placitas, NM where he helps Jules Nyquist run Jules’ Poetry Playhouse and edit Poetry Playhouse Publications. He is the author of five full-length collections, including Joe Rides Again (FootHills Publishing 2020).