Here is one poem among 138 others from Alan Goldman’s Reflections on Mountaineering: A Journey Through Life as Experienced in the Mountains.
What Is A Mountain’s Meaning for Mankind? What is a mountain but a feature of the grimy profane? What is humanity but a spark of the purest sacred divine? As Blake said, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet.” A merging of our forms until the world is more complete? Do we humanize the mountain by investing it in ourselves? Or does the mountain subsume us into its mundane shell?
Yearning, longing, finding meaning in the quest: these are the peculiarly poignant, peculiarly human elements celebrated in these poems. Mountain as Magic Mountain: mountain climbing as unrequited process, journey, as ultimate deliverance. Mountains pose the same crazy obstacles as life itself: frustration, remorse, doubt, despair.
Goldman’s flair for the word — he is a retired attorney, and this is the fifth edition of his Reflections — arrives, quanta of many surprises and dynamite, in both blank and metered verse. Sections of the book are variously devoted to Flow, Reality & Dream, Awe & Wonder, Hazards of A Climb. According to Goldman, “…a mountaineer experiences the secret facets of his obscure desire both in poetic terms and in verse”—all offering a fleeting glimpse into the hidden aspects of a mountaineer’s experiences.”
This introduction, written by the poet, is entirely consistent with everything that comes after. The language is alternately allusive, elusive, sylvan, of the tramontane. The mountain has long stood for ascension, for progress toward dream. Thomas Mann did this in The Magic Mountain. Jon Krakuer’s Into Thin Air reminds us that one of Mother Nature’s facets is avalanche.
Goldman makes nature speak the language of man — the only language we can ever really know, our true home. Thank you, Alan Goldman, for limning the gorgeous metaphysics of the Heights. Readers will gasp, moan, smile in happy recognition of their personal peaks and summits in these poems.
