Gabriola Island volunteer finds poverty, poetry in Guatemala

Kit Pepper is ready to talk about the events and impressions she gained while volunteering in the northwestern highlands of Guatemala. There she was aligned with Alianza, a project which responded to grassroots requests for education and health care from the local Mam-speaking women and men of Comitancillo and surrounding rural aldeas, altitude 7000 feet.

Unequivocal beauty and blunt terror, abiding forces in these Guatemalan highlands, stand together in her poems in unsparing and exacting intimacy. This is a landscape where, by day, a machete manifests as a broadside percussive instrument tamping and leveling damp adobe bricks, while at night, becomes a weapon of domestic malice, slashing to the bone the arms and skull of a young mother.

Her writing started out as fragments and sketches in a tiny, torn notebook in a vest pocket as she took a daily run that drew her from the highland plateau down an impossibly steep mountain fissure to a gravel road that meanders parallel to the Rio Chixal.

The poems recount how this morning run, which started as an arduous almost impossible task, surprisingly became an integral part of the her day; how predawn persistence gradually took up residency in legs and lungs. As the run and especially La Gruta, the temple-steep crevasse of descent and ascent, wedged their way into her inner landscape, she became familiar to the children and to the men and women who daily walked the route.

Perhaps most profoundly, and despite efforts to diminish the suffering of one particular street dog, she witnessed the permanent lasso of suffering. "Suffering changed shape before my eyes and bounded along beside me as yet one more wound-festering feral dog."

As her work with Alianza deepened, she began to understand the switchback nature of time and that birth and death are only examples "of the capacity of spirit to rest a moment on earth, in this mist-laden plateau."

Ruth R. Pierson has called the book "An astounding debut collection, a sustained chain of thirty-one poetic journal entries the author first drafted while working for a clinic in the highlands of Guatemala. Kit Pepper, a runner with a machete-sharp eye for detail and a linguist's ear for polyphonous sound, takes us on a journey of self-discovery through a landscape of beguiling beauty and heart-wrenching poverty, over cobblestone streets and pot-holed roads, up and down the steep paths of La Gruta gorge, through bird-filled pine forests, and past laundry cast over cacti, gangs of snarling, maltreated dogs, and garbage dumps circled by vultures with heads like conquistador helmets. Buckle up for a breath-taking ride."