Classic writer’s pose- hunkered down in the doorway, stars punctuating the dark upstate New York night, thin ribbon of cigarette smoke tethering earth to sky. This is the Catskills, Overlook Mountain in particular, and the dominant inspiration for Guy Reed’s latest collection, Time Under The Overlook (2025: Bushwhack Books). His poems search deeply into that earth, the mysteries of the woods that surround his home, and for the news those stars have to tell. There are storms, to be sure. A turtle on their back, needing rescue. Dragonflies circling overhead in a wonderful vortex. Reed is here, watching it all, writing it all down.
This latest book reveals the underlying motivation for all that Reed has written about before: home, family, friends, with Overlook as companion, parent, guru. These poems are never restricted to a single dimension either:
Pressing my body from behind
I feel a subtle breeze, a ghost.
With the wind an equal
opposite force, I am immobile.
(“In The Wind”)
There are as well occasional nods to deities, aliens, and more frequently a host of forest creatures that would make even Snow White green with envy. Reed watches, questions, and at times envies the animals at his door. The irony is that only humans have this luxury of contemplation, a talent the author revels in even at his lowest points. Even nighttime, an unacknowledged phenomenon to most, serves as a museum for Reed’s musings. Half a dozen prose poems interspersed throughout give the author the territory to create an even more textured scene.
With an outsider’s perspective (Reed was born in Minnesota but has spent the last thirty years or so in the Hudson Valley), he brings a wistful clarity to his visions. He is an Everyman poet, inviting the reader with him into the yard, to breathe in the mountain air, share a cigarette and conversation. In the title poem, Reed brings you along on a hike up Overlook, never easy but worth the trip:
…All we can do is climb
(declination more arduous than ascent)
somewhere to get a better view
for as long as we can…
Will Nixon’s thorough introduction includes both history of this region and a foreshadowing of things to come in the book. It provides valuable context for those new to Overlook as well as offering up unfamiliar tidbits to those who’ve spent decades exploring the Catskills. Inspired no doubt by close friend and fellow bushwhacker, the late Michael Perkins, Nixon hasn’t missed a square inch of these fabled hills, documenting all the way. One only needs a topographical map to more fully appreciate Overlook and its neighbors. Kelly Sinclair’s evocative photos mark the beginning of each section, and both illuminate the poems and lure the reader on a dream-like detour beyond Reed’s specifics.
Reed doesn’t just report findings. He believes the relationship between human and mountain should be one of a fair exchange. In “Presence,” the first poem in the book, he says,
I take my poems from the mountain’s shadow,
I leave my flesh in return.
If these poems are the measure, Reed’s debt is more than paid.
Time Under The Overlook, by Guy Reed, is available from Bushwhack Books for just $20. You can get your copy via woodstockarts.com and all your favorite Hudson Valley bookstores.
Thanks for such insight to this book!