Peter Yovu's new poetry chapbook is an exploration of what is most us
- josephaversano
- Feb 4
- 3 min read
Half Day Moon Press is delighted to announce the digital-format release of Peter Yovu's new poetry chapbook What Is Least Me Is Most Who I Am (HDMP NO. 19). While the work on one level draws from the wilds of Yovu's Vermont, his youth, and travels to far-flung shores, it primarily plunges the reader into the core of what is most us.
Hinting at how unearthing what is most us is even possible, the chapbook's opening line reads: emptiness is home to all things but itself. This "emptiness" is the space we abide in emptied of egocentricity and any limiting notions of what the self can be (cf. "what is least me"). It is this clearing that affords enough room for co-existence and inter-being (at least ecopoetically) with "all things"; and in Yovu's work, this extends to all that is present, future, and past.
Nature is included among "all things", and for Yovu, nature is hardly an entity that can be locked outside while we are cozily sitting indoors in our favorite reading chair. It is nearer and far more intimate than one may think. It pervades our waking thoughts and dreams, as made apparent in the poem "This Animal". To go even further, we can go so far as to assert that our innate nature is nature itself. By way of comparison, what has been said about Thomas Tranströmer's writing in connection with nature can be said about Yovu's:
... throughout Tranströmer's body of work are the transferences between nature and humans, which the reader comes to embrace as transformations ... There is communion ... (1)
The same commentator states further on, "Tranströmer animates nature and humanizes it as well, which creates an intimate surrealism." (2) This sense of overlapping being in all of its surrealness is apparent, for instance, in the following Yovu poem:
The Poet
You say trees, you say dusk,
believing there is
something you can track, follow
into what is
no longer belief
but life—
then, as if eyes others than yours could see,
you pause,
look up just as a fox
loping across the field
to where the forest is
already night
pauses,
turns,
looks back at you,
and you
are gone
Emptiness is also "home" to language. Yovu brings us closer to the roots of inherited language in his poem, "Regression," where primal clods of sound emerge unobstructed from both the physical body and the "mud dark and dankly rooted" collective unconscious. These "break through the earthflesh" the poet is "rolled into" and clump and combine to form language. More importantly, it is from this unclogged and preliterate place that any freshness or originality in language can begin to show. Yet this must come at the expense of any firmly fixed boundaries that rope off the self from the deep. Transformation occurs when such hindrances "slip under" and "drown"...
Regression
Words sing me, hold me, crumble
to ur-sounds, sputter,
dissolve. I slip under
the word-bog,
mud-dark and dankly rooted.
Larval lip-bubbles
break through the earthflesh
I am rolled into, am
inseparable from.
A cochleal ocean
hums, brings
waves of whitewarmth
to swim into and drown.
There is yet further room for emptiness when considering the shorter verses that intersperse What Is Least Me Is Most Who I Am, including the one-line poems that conclude most sections. These sit surrounded by blank space on all sides as if to embody the very "emptiness" mentioned at the outset of Yovu's book. Single lines or stanzas are what longer poems are built upon or even how they begin, and their coiled compactness springs outwards upon impact.
sea breeze the barnacle at the back of my eye opens
Additionally, the shorter pieces have the feel of haiku embedded in haibun, that is, if one allows for the sections of longer poems to substitute for haibun prose. This, no doubt, challenges more traditional ideas of what a haibun can be.
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Other works by Peter Yovu include Shine Shadow (Red Moon Press, 2024) , which received the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award in 2024, and Imago (Ornithopter Press, 2016). A print edition of What Is Least Me Is Most Who I Am will be made available in the near future.
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