It’s strange to know someone, a writer, a poet, over a span of years, and to know them from different perspectives. 

When I first went to VSU, I heard other teachers describe Trent Busch as a “loner” and “a hard worker,” who would hole up in his office every morning and write away on his poems. I heard that he was easier to know on the golf course, where he would give helpful tips and encouragement. (Teachers talk, you know.)

Later, I also grew to know Trent from being in his classroom where he meticulously dissected famous poems and not-so-famous poems with deep insight and feeling.  

He was an exacting teacher, who only — if I’m remembering correctly — gave one A as a final grade on a poem. And to ensure that he wouldn’t be influenced by who the writer was, we students were required to just put our Social Security number at the top of the page.

So, I’m always surprised when Trent allows me to review his poetry, and I’m honored when on the front page, he writes, “my friend,” which is and isn’t exactly true since I’ve not seen him since I was a student. Most of all I’m impressed that Trent is still writing poetry and getting it published. 

In this age, when most people seem addicted to their hand-held gadgets, it takes a special kind of person and energy to keep writing. It also gives me the courage to continue writing and reading, which are equal parts in the same artistic process.

Trent’s latest book, “West Virginians,” is an example of the work of a true poet, one who brings all his life, knowledge, and experiences into the poetry. One can even find one’s own life in Trent’s poems. 

The book, divided into four parts: The Forties, Older Than The Trees, Family History and Edges of Roads, to me, is full of sadness and secrets, and it’s up to a reader to ferret them out. But aren’t all really good poems that speak to a reader’s heart full of sadness and secrets? So it’s worth the effort.

Scholars have spent fruitless ages trying to find out who the Dark Lady is in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and one could spend a fair amount of time trying to find out who the women are in Trent’s poems. It’s as if he took all the people he knew in West Virginia and even perhaps afterward and put their secrets and sadness into his poems.

Yet a few lines strike me as being oddly funny, which made me laugh out loud.

I wish I could tell it and not exaggerate.

I wish. I wish. I wish I had

some confession to make.

The most telling, saddest line in another poem, an emotion most everyone has experienced, comes in the poem “Poem Found in an Old Trunk.” There, in the first stanza, Trent, objectively relates an ordinary event in a day, and then in the next two stanzas, doing tasks on a farm, he changes to the first person, the “I”, and the last stanza says, heart-breakingly everything, “She has moved away.”

I grew up in the West, mostly desert, and also in the South, mostly pine trees and palmettos, so it’s good to read Trent’s descriptions of the East Coast, a place of snowy mountains and beech trees, a place I will now, considering my advanced age, never know. 

He takes West Virginia and its people and uses them so effectively that one is reminded of Richard Hugo’s book, “The Triggering Town,” which tells an aspiring writer to use his or her town or country as a jumping-off point into writing a poem or even a novel. And it’s good advice.

What did Virginia Woolf say, “I only need the first line.”

“Smoke,” one of the last poems in the book, has to be one of my favorites since it tells of releasing a deer caught in some brambles, and then a line of Keats’ about fall’s song, and then the best line, “when Death is only a jester/ behind his motley hood.” Oh, how rich with meaning.

Yes! Let us keep living every day, reading and writing like Trent.

Actually, I feel I could write a different review on each part of this book, for the reader is truly given four perspectives of Trent’s life, now and then, and West Virginia, which, lest we forget, was that section of the country that fought with the North in the War Between the States. 

Or as Le Breun Trent’s alter-ego, says, “we laid up for winter,” trying as hard as he could to be true to himself and to stand up for the rights of all human beings.

It is interesting to read back through all three of Trent’s books, and for me, to read even the old poems of Trent’s that were first published in the Odradek, VSU’s literary magazine, and in Snake Nation Review. It’s a great gift to know a writer through their work, which is often more revealing than any biography.

Try, if you can, to attend the Sept. 20 art exhibition at 5 p.m. at the Turner Center for the Arts, where Trent will be the featured writer for this book, “West Virginians,” and his second book, “Plum Level and Square,” which missed out because of the pandemic.

The Turner Center for the Arts, with its great displays of art and writing every six weeks, is just one more example of how talented the people in Lowndes County are and how we should treasure them.

Roberta George is the founding editor of the Snake Nation Press and an award-winning novelist and poet.