Separation Point
Photographer: Jason Poole
Words and Music: Benjie Howard
10” x 11.5” – 96 pages
Hardcover — $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-984007-5-3
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What began as a Grand Canyon river trip involving two friends—one a Northwestern poet, musician, and river guide, the other a British photographer—came to be, over the course of a decade, the book at hand.
Jason Russell Poole’s photographs explore a metaphysical landscape. The harsh visage of a policeman and dark plumes from a power plant give way to a Native American powwow. There is stillness in a river’s rapid; rocks become abstractions and clouds take on forms like architecture. Poole explores the precarious condition of America, hoping to reexamine our relationship with nature at a time of crisis for the Earth’s stability. Most of all, he seeks “to allow a wildness within to expand” as he explores the American West.
BOOK REVIEWS:
MEDITATION ON AN ALTERNATIVE FUTURE
by Erin Currier – painter
Separation Point documents the adventure and camaraderie of two imaginative and introspective friends on an emancipatory quest. Nearly three-quarters of a century after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Benjie Howard and Jason Russell Poole take the wheel on a path well forged: a quintessentially American spiritual pilgrimage, inspired by the open road.
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READING THE HIEROGLYPHICS OF NATURE
by Godfrey Reggio – director of Koyaanisqatsi
We see the world through language, but our language may no longer describe our world. Over a ten-year period, Jason Russell Poole and Benjie Howard left one world to try to see another. They breached a separation point and used the edges of our world to frame a wilderness beyond. They began to read the hieroglyphics of nature. Their search for literacy is not unlike how humans first learned to read, long before pictographs and alphabets, through metaphors of earth, air, water, and fire. It is into this elemental place that Poole and Howard have submerged, entering the wilderness where language was born.
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REVIEWED
Separation Point: The Edge of Wildness
Jason Russell Poole, Photographs & Benjie Howard, Words
by: Four Winds Journal © 2020
It is hard to open this book, to read one of Benjie’s prose poems or look deeply at any of Jason’s poignant photographs, without feeling breathless—teetering on a ledge, my own separation point between exhilaration and despair. I want to go on, to read more, see more, but the images and words are tilting my ledge, tumbling me into the grand canyon of all the feelings I’ve kept under wraps for so long. Reluctantly I close the book—I’ll return to it later, but I always return.
This powerful weaving of poetry and photographs is particularly meaningful now, in the midst of political chaos, civil unrest, and a global pandemic. It offers both apology and reparation for the world’s wounds—those we see and those we can’t or won’t—and in this way brings us the peace one feels when the doctor’s diagnosis also holds out hope of healing.
The German poet Ranier Maria Rilke wrote that beauty and terror share the same space in our hearts—that there is seductive beauty in what we most fear and subterranean fear in what we most love. Separation Point is a powerful illustration of this truth, a searing portrait of human life on Planet Earth. Yet it teaches that despite our predation, Gaia offers us glimpses of beauty in the most unlikely places—moments of breath-taking awe that stop us in our tracks as we plow clumsily through the day’s tedium toward night’s addictions and promised relief.
An oddly shaped cloud
A “yard dog” –abandoned car in fresh-fallen snow
A dory, resting beside the Colorado River in summer fog
Jason Poole’s and Benjie Howard’s skillful and sensitive juxtaposition of man and Nature could shatter us—but it doesn’t. Instead it highlights not so much the pain of our presence here as the resilience of Gaia herself, and her determination to override our hubris, to humble us with so much beauty that we must eventually embrace our true role—not as predators but as protectors—of our home planet.
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“This is a courageous book. It is not just another gorgeous coffee-table offering to stare at and admire. Rather, it deals with both extreme beauty and extreme apprehension about the breakdown surrounding that beauty. It is a call to re-wild ourselves in every way possible.
In this sense, Separation Point is both an inspiring and disturbing experience. And ultimately, very thought provoking. Because the more you go through it, absorbing the spectacular photographs and connecting them to the intimate and often disturbed poetic commentaries, the more you will understand how we must change our behavior by both acknowledging, yet not surrendering to the challenges presented by our broken western hearts.”
—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War, If Mountains Die, My Heart Belongs to Nature and On the Mesa
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PHOTOEYE listing of Separation Point
They will promote it for 1 week beginning on Valentines day. Below is the link:
https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=ZJ634&i=&i2=
Erin Currier – painter –
MEDITATION ON AN ALTERNATIVE FUTURE
by Erin Currier – painter
Separation Point documents the adventure and camaraderie of two imaginative and introspective friends on an emancipatory quest. Nearly three-quarters of a century after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Benjie Howard and Jason Russell Poole take the wheel on a path well forged: a quintessentially American spiritual pilgrimage, inspired by the open road.
:::
Godfrey Reggio –
READING THE HIEROGLYPHICS OF NATURE
by Godfrey Reggio – director of Koyaanisqatsi
We see the world through language, but our language may no longer describe our world. Over a ten-year period, Jason Russell Poole and Benjie Howard left one world to try to see another. They breached a separation point and used the edges of our world to frame a wilderness beyond. They began to read the hieroglyphics of nature. Their search for literacy is not unlike how humans first learned to read, long before pictographs and alphabets, through metaphors of earth, air, water, and fire. It is into this elemental place that Poole and Howard have submerged, entering the wilderness where language was born.
Valentine McKay-Riddell –
Separation Point: The Edge of Wildness
Jason Russell Poole, Photographs & Benjie Howard, Words
by: Valentine McKay-Riddell © 2020
It is hard to open this book, to read one of Benjie’s prose poems or look deeply at any of Jason’s poignant photographs, without feeling breathless—teetering on a ledge, my own separation point between exhilaration and despair. I want to go on, to read more, see more, but the images and words are tilting my ledge, tumbling me into the grand canyon of all the feelings I’ve kept under wraps for so long. Reluctantly I close the book—I’ll return to it later, but I always return.
This powerful weaving of poetry and photographs is particularly meaningful now, in the midst of political chaos, civil unrest, and a global pandemic. It offers both apology and reparation for the world’s wounds—those we see and those we can’t or won’t—and in this way brings us the peace one feels when the doctor’s diagnosis also holds out hope of healing.
The German poet Ranier Maria Rilke wrote that beauty and terror share the same space in our hearts—that there is seductive beauty in what we most fear and subterranean fear in what we most love. Separation Point is a powerful illustration of this truth, a searing portrait of human life on Planet Earth. Yet it teaches that despite our predation, Gaia offers us glimpses of beauty in the most unlikely places—moments of breath-taking awe that stop us in our tracks as we plow clumsily through the day’s tedium toward night’s addictions and promised relief.
An oddly shaped cloud
A “yard dog” –abandoned car in fresh-fallen snow
A dory, resting beside the Colorado River in summer fog
Jason Poole’s and Benjie Howard’s skillful and sensitive juxtaposition of man and Nature could shatter us—but it doesn’t. Instead it highlights not so much the pain of our presence here as the resilience of Gaia herself, and her determination to override our hubris, to humble us with so much beauty that we must eventually embrace our true role—not as predators but as protectors—of our home planet.