Mythos of the Door

Mythos of the Door contains lyric and narrative poems that explore the underlying spirit of Door County, Wisconsin. Millions of visitors come to the Door every year because of its miles of shoreline, art galleries, indoor and outdoor live theaters, musicians and music venues, nightlife, sailing, fishing, golf, small shops, and bookstores. Once in the county they visit small villages and the city of Sturgeon Bay. What they do not always see beyond dolostone cliffs, the waters of Lake Michigan, Green Bay, Sturgeon Bay, or inland lakes, the forests, or the wonder of the state parks are the stories that go back to when American Indians, the first French fur traders, the sailors of sailing or steamships, or those that first planted the magnificent cherry orchards created a mythos woven into the natural beauty of a magic peninsula.metap

A mythos is a myth or mythology, a traditional theme or plot structure, or a set of beliefs of assumptions. Poetry, at its very best, is an exploration. In this book, story poems are interwoven with lyric sonnets and a wide range of other forms of mostly traditional verse forms to explore the mythos of the door from the wild waters of Death's Door between Washington Island and Gill's Rock at the tip of the peninsula. In doing so, the book as whole looks past the surface of the stories and the characters of the Door and explores the meaning of what we all are, living inside our multitude of histories, as human beings.

The stories told with meter and rhyme range from that of a Potawatomi woman confronting a wolf with pale, green eyes frightened away from here by a large black bear to the classic Christmas story when an immigrant man and his daughter try to cross a frozen Death's Door just before Christmas during a year when Lake Superior has frozen over and confronted by ominous cracks in the ice. Potawatomi and fur traders come into contact, sailors try to survive furious storms, and an old man at Christmas miraculously works his way out of a deep depression caused by his wife's death when he sees two ravens and snow geese during a winter storm.

The sheer beauty of lyric poetry describing magic moments can be found too, as well the life of stone sculptures of women "Staring intently out of bronze, pewter, metallic blue, and silver/At the nothingness of everything." This is old fashioned poetry in an age where rhyme and meter has gone out of style, but it recalls the magic of poetry that has enchanted generations upon generations of readers from the time when Beowulf was first written down on a page into our contemporary world.