Along the Way

by Scott Pariseau

Along Pariseau's Way on prairie and at sea's edge, birds fly overhead. Nature, spirit, beauty, and memories of family break forth. They enter into mind and heart. The interventions are quiet and gentle, unexpected, disruptive, and as mysterious as two feathers falling from sky at his feet. They come and appear like moonlight/on lapping water, /scattering off/the cold backs/of silvery fishes/just beneath. His verses evoke, query, incant, and simply give him reason to ponder. Things permeate, enter communion--and stand in impalpable synchronicity. The kindness, nostalgia, sadness, and beauty of these poems are reasons to give Along the Way a read. There is a bonus in prose. . . . You see how struggle and travels in southern France and French Canada to find his identity and correct last name . . . harvested an understanding of history, family, and life.

—Joseph A. Amato, author of over twenty-six books, including Dust, A History of the Small and Invisible, My Three Sicilies, and Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

Scott Pariseau's poems are sharp-eyed and gracious. They engage both the daily fine points of the near-at-hand world and the ever-shifting interfaces of generations, history, memory, and simple wonder. You will remember these tender poems for a long time. Warm heart. Clear water.

—Merrill Gilfillan, poet, essayist, author of fiction and creative non-fiction, winner of PEN/ Martha Albrand award for Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains and the Western States Book Award for Chokecherry Places; his most recent book of poetry is Stars Seen Then.

Federico Garcia Lorca said a poet should be a professor of the five senses, and Scott Pariseau's poems are marvelously sensory. Indeed, many of the poems read like verbal paintings. His poems aren't ostentatious—there's no sense of “Look, Ma, no hands!” or verbal pyrotechnics—but they nonetheless contain images and phrases that are somehow simultaneously quiet and startlingly original. Witness these lines from “In Autumn Light”: “Crows / fly slow, / like black soil / rolling / off plows.” It's a bona fide pleasure to go “along the way” with Scott Pariseau as he chronologically records, via both poems and short prose pieces, a lifetime of vivid observations and experience.

—David Jauss, a widely published and awarded poet and fiction writer. He is also professor emeritus and retired from teaching Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and continues to teach in the MFA in Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of three collections of short stories, Black Maps, Crimes of Passion, and Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories; two collections of poems, You Are Not Here and Improvising Rivers; and a collection of essays, On Writing Fiction.

Born in Minneapolis, Scott Pariseau was raised on the southwestern Minnesota prairie. After moving to Oregon for a year, he has since lived most of his life in various places on Colorado's Front Range and Western Slope, with a brief one-year interlude in Oklahoma. His first jobs while young included working for farmers baling hay, picking rocks from fields, hand-pulling cockleburs and thistles from corn and bean fields, cleaning hog barns - he remembers that his first job was picking up corn cobs blown down in fields in an Autumn storm and was paid 20 cents an hour, and that he was so small he could barely carry the heavy bucket of corn. He also mowed lawns, worked in a grocery store, pumped gas, and performed other odd jobs while young. Later, he spent a career in the publishing industry, as an assistant vice president for a scholarly book publisher, typographer and book designer, editor and proofreader, production manager, computer systems manager for book production, customer service and sales for printing companies, and even had a brief stint as a museum curator. For the last decade, he has worked in the natural foods industry. He has returned to the Front Range of Colorado and for the last eight years has lived again in the Boulder area with his treasured companions - wonder cat Pippin, Shelties Bronwen and Anachie, Afghan Hound Spyder-Mae, and various English Trumpeter and homing pigeons.