Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge (2008)

Paperback, 59 pages, $17.95

A map of life

Mark Perlberg, a summer poet of Vinalhaven, died last year in June at the age of 79. He left behind a deeply moving self-portrait in the form of a slender collection of his last book of poems-his fourth-titled Waiting for the Alchemist.

I only met Mark Perlberg once when he dropped in the office to thank us for publishing one of his earlier poems on the back cover of Island Journal some years ago. But I liked him immediately, a kind and unassuming, somewhat shuffling man who left a slight ripple of Zen calm in his wake. Reading this last collection of his poems made me think, I wish I had known him better, but then I realized this collection is a map of his life; it’s elegant lines a reflection of his meditations, sprinkled with sharp and pungent island references, as he waited for the eternal ferryman to take him across the river Styx. He’s still here for any who care to drop by and get to know him.

I especially appreciated Perlberg’s insight about an ancient islander in “The Old Man in a Green House” still holed up while his neighbors are trying to get him to move in elder housing. Nothing doing; “he won’t hear of it.”

        

         But most islanders will push just so far.

         Then they wonder who is helping whom.

 

In “The Island Without Tourists,” Perlberg revels in fading colors of the fall with its moments etched clearly in memory; “No lights from neighboring houses”, excites him along with the rushing of the wind in treetops, which “sizzles in my ears,”

        

         My own sound in the mix-

         big shoes on gravel.

         It’s all music.

        

I was also deeply moved by his the many references to his wife of 56 years, Anna, in the poem near the end of the collection “In My Next Life.” He imagines himself in his own boat plying among “the green islands of the Gulf of Maine.” He’ll be “amiable, mostly, but large and formidable.”

 

         I’ll insist you be present

         in my next life-and the one after that.

 

Who could ask for more?

Philip Conkling is the president of the Island Institute.