On The Geese at the Gates

The Geese at the Gates
by Drucilla Wall
ISBN 978-1-907056-59-8
Salmon Poetry (Ireland), €12.

Waking next to a lover (and, it would seem, then waking that lover), the culture (can one call it that?) of Kansas football, how to feel (if not be) invisible, time’s losses and the pathos of diminished places against the pleasures of Irish new ones, the large-scale sense of chance or possibility shutting down, “small actions, lives touched” – Drucilla Wall knows these and many other things, as her book The Geese at the Gates readily attests.

Though these poems range across the globe – from Canada to the aforementioned Kansas to Nebraska, Yellowstone Park, to St. Louis, to the Ireland of Enniscorthy and The Burren – they remain united by a consistency of voice and the inclination to story. They can be fruitfully and pleasurably read as a sort of unhurried checking-in: what does Drucilla Wall have to say today? Thus this book does not so much make one narrative or accumulate a single set of focused concerns as it does make, poem by poem, a sense of human company: a visitor in the house, someone you can count on to say something smart, well-considered, and not necessarily what you expect. One poem might talk about the speaker’s son, Michael, another about a dog, then one about a painting or a spider or a cat.

Yet the variety of subjects paints a consistent ambition to talk back to the clutter and rush that now seems inevitable in contemporary western life. Perhaps this rush and clutter is at least as old as Thoreau? In any case, Wall’s poems seek to carve out a space in which thoughtfulness might get itself worked out, a space in which genuine feeling might declare itself. Sometimes it’s merely a moment, one, say, in which a hiker confronted by a bear remembers “how close to God he felt / in the wilderness, how he hadn’t planned this hike / until the ranger called the area off limits…” So he hikes, and finds the exact closeness he’d hoped for, a mama bear “reared to full height, her cubs / crashing in the brush.” What’s so interesting about this poem is how it ends. This hiker, as Wall imagines him, registers not so much fear as a recognition of what he’s risking at that moment: “As she [the bear] considered him and began to bellow, / he remembered his loveable, fat-assed son, / left asleep and alone back at the camp, / thirteen years old and awkward as a duck on skis.” No pulling of punches here. And that’s it: the poem ends with “awkward as a duck on skis.”

That last image is not expected – and made more delightful as a result. What began as a hike towards some elemental truth becomes a reminder about the obligations of family connection and the risk of a thoughtless narcissism. The poem doesn’t push this agenda; it does not baldly announce. Rather it makes a space in which, in the moment of the poem’s action (surely not more than a few seconds), a flawed character reacts convincingly. We don’t have to be confronted by a bear; all we have to do is read “Trail Closed, Yellowstone.”

The great majority of poems in The Geese at the Gates work in just this way: they focus attention on something, and then in smart, well-constructed, humane ways, they repay a reader’s attention. Thus, they can serve as an example of what one sort of reading, at its best, might enact. A well-spoken speaker – someone canny, intelligent, sympathetic, unpredictable, critical, balanced – makes (or invokes) via language a presence based in intelligent, idiosyncratic regard. Such work rewards readers who bring similar a similar regard to their reading. In some odd way, this compact between work and reader enacts one kind of ideal human relationship. The best and fullest expression on the page asks from us those same qualities as we read – if the writer does her job, if the reader can manage to do the same.

The Geese at the Gates is not a poetry of ecstasy or religious fervor, nor does it seek to create some mythic reality. Rather, to borrow a phrase from Czeslaw Milosz, these poems stay “loyal to reality” as they attempt to describe, examine, and consider it.  Their comment, thoughtfulness, and perspectives make for rich rewards.

“This is the division of virtues through their centers”

On Emma Howells' Slim Night of Recognition
Poems, Eastern Washington University Press, 2007


The critic Roland Barthes is famous, or infamous if you choose, for a number of declarations having to do with authors, with their works, and with how readers read. In “The Death of the Author,” he argues that “writing is the destruction of every voice … the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” Later in the same essay, Barthes says “it is language which speaks, not the author.” Barthes’ point has something to do with language itself, with how it at once gestures towards something and yet falsifies it: “apple” is not and will never be the fruit itself.

Yet it is quite possible to visit Westminster Abbey, take with you a page of the Prologue of Canterbury Tales, and read it while standing at Chaucer’s grave. You can do something similar at Wordsworth’s tomb in Grasmere or Emily Dickinson's in Amherst. And if you have written a book yourself, you know something of the odd but very definitely present relationship between your self and the object you may pick up off the table, hold in your hand, and open and read.

Such observations come to mind when holding Emma Howell’s new book, Slim Night of Recognition. Her picture graces the book’s back cover, and next to it is a brief biography that reads in part “She spent a year studying in Spain and six months in Brazil, where she died at the age of twenty. This book is her first collection.” These two sentences together serve to stun you for a moment with their implications: twenty is too young for anyone, especially any writer, to die; this book is her first collection, which means she was most unusually talented to have produced work that qualifies as more than mere juvenilia; this is her first collection and we shall have no others. Of such recognitions, the last must be the hardest, the slipperiest to grasp.

So what voice do we hear in Emma Howells’ poems? It is, first, a voice beguiled by consonants and vowels, by the rhythms a sentence can make and repeat. Even before clear narrative or definite summarizable content, this sense of language comes through. You can hear it particularly here in the r’s of dresser, supper, father, letter:

The hands that surrounded me made bird
shapes and catcalls
purring me closer.
I arranged dolls on the dresser
and asked for a pumpkin supper
and wrote my father a letter ...

What others look for when they first begin to read a new book of poems, I’m not sure. Maybe it varies from reader to reader and from book to book. I listen first for a voice I can hear and want to hear, and only then for what it does with words, form, content, import. The language in Slim Night of Recognition embodies such a voice – such a set of voices:

“luminescent drops arc above the wind’s dips and joints”,

“Lay yourself down like a half-moon, / let the vagabond night take you.”

“Our coast was invented by wanderers / and bringers of ice and magnets, / the rightful owners of our opposite poles.”

“We come in, opening / and closing our mouths like wings. / Swallows, we fly away, / lie down between breast bones / and the heart made night.”

And then there is this opening to the poem “Just This:”

All I know I have said into an emptiness
to test the depth of it.
And all I have been allowed to keep
has echoed back to me by some divine
miracle of physics…

Emma Howell’s book is just out from Eastern Washington University Press. I know where it sits on my desk. I feel no compelling hurry to know it fully; the promises of discovery sometimes displace gluttony or greed. This much may be affirmed: when I’ve opened it, it has more than generously repaid my attention, slowed the clock. Since it gives the only Emma Howell poems we shall have, I choose, for now, to read it slowly, often.

John Burnside, Part 2

Selected Poems, by John Burnside, Jonathan Cape, 2006.

By any measure, Burnside’s Selected offers a severely limited selection indeed: drawn from eight earlier volumes, it runs only 112 pages. Of the twenty-three poems in Asylum Dance, winner of the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award, only six (the largest number for any one volume) find inclusion here. The book carries no introduction. Hence, though we might readily assume Burnside himself made the selection, we cannot positively know how poems were ruled in or out. Interestingly however, while the table of contents clearly indicates a chronological presentation of a handful of poems from each of eight separate volumes, the body of Selected Poems shows no such separations: the book is designed and printed to appear as, and to read as, a continuous single volume.

If one determines to read any book of poems straight through, attentive to its ordering, then one must start at the start. And it makes sense to presume that the first several poems in a book strike the opening notes or themes or voices. (Whether such a presumption is proved accurate becomes one of the ongoing questions reading addresses.)

Burnside’s Selected Poems begins with these three words: “Like me, you…,” and with them, this book asserts a directly personal voice that asks for and assumes an immediate human commonality. “Like me, you sometimes waken / early in the dark / thinking you have driven miles / through inward country”. And thus, the first full stanza also claims a territory – that metaphorical, dream haunted “inward country.”

Interestingly, the second poem seems no poem at all. It’s called “Suburbs,” and it is presented in 14 prose sections (or paragraphs). If this were music, the notes of the first poem would be a brief bit of Mozart; the notes for the second, a slow movement with full orchestra. Or, to mix metaphors, in its first two poems, Burnside’s Selected claims a large territory. As different as they are in form and length, the first two poems share a common interest in what is real and what is not:

“The suburb has its own patterns: arrangements of bottles on front steps and scraped ice on driveways, enactments of chores and duties, conversations at gates and hedges, sweeping and binding movements, arcane calculations of cost and distance. All this activity is intended to make it appear real – a commonplace – but its people cannot evade the thought, like the though which sometimes comes in dreams, that nothing is solid at all, and the suburb is no more substantial than a mirage in a blizzard, or the shimmering waves off an exit road where spilled petrol evaporates in the sun.” (p. 3)

And eventually, the suburbs implies a place

“where everything is implied: city, warehouse district, night stop, woods emerging from mists, as if newly-created, like those Japanese paper flowers which unfold in water, empty back roads at night where, momentarily, a soughing of wings passes close in the dark, followed by the tug of silence, the feel of grain fields shifting under the wind, a lamp in a window beyond, where someone has sat up all night, drinking tea, remembering something like this.” (p. 5)

With “Suburbs” we see confirmed one characteristic element of Burnside’s poems. Even when they echo William Carlos Williams, they give the sense of being allowed to make themselves, to follow a line of imagery and of thought until the process itself arrives at some satisfactory stopping point. Here, for example, is the poem that follows “Suburbs.” It’s called “Signal Stop, Near Horsley:”

Smoke in the woods
like someone walking in a silent film
beside the tracks.

A shape I recognize – not smoke, or not just smoke,
and not just snow on hazels
or fox-trails from the platform to the trees,

but winter, neither friend
nor stranger, like the girl I sometimes glimpse

at daybreak, near the crossing, in a dress
of sleet and berries, gazing at the train. (p. 7)

Though the form here shows some regularity, two stanzas of three lines followed by two stanzas of two lines, the regularity seems to result not from artifice determined in advance (as, for example, a sonnet might) but rather from a way of thinking that uses form to encourage itself forward.

In technical terms, the early poems in Burnside’s Selected face the challenge of how to mediate between the brevity of poems like the one quoted in full above and the large prose sprawl of “Suburbs.” Thematically, the Selected makes it clearest initial claim with the early poem “Halloween.” In it, the speaker confidently and directly recounts what has been necessary “as I come to define my place.” It’s a definition pursued not in church or school or home, but out of doors, in backyards, among “barn owls hunting in pairs along the hedge, / the smell of frost on the linen, the smell of leaves…

The village is over there, in a pool of bells,
and beyond that nothing,
or only the other versions of myself,
familiar and strange, and swaddled in their time
as I am, standing out beneath the moon
or stooping to a clutch of twigs and straw
to breathe a little life into the fire. (p. 11)

Perhaps what beguiles most in Burnside’s poems is their deft modulations of sounds, of consonants and vowels. The language itself carries richness and beauty, the word music of English. Here’s another example, the first stanza of “The Pit Town in Winter”: “Everything would vanish in the snow, / fox bones and knuckles of coal / and dolls left out in the gardens, / red-mouthed and nude” (p. 14). And the stanza is deft in one other way. While it affirms the vanishing of things, what it does is reveal them plainly.

As one reads farther into Burnside’s Selected Poems, one can see his growing mastery of a particular lyricism most immediately described by his use of sentences that carry themselves forward over many lines. Burnside often pairs this technique with another: he links lengthy individually numbered sections (each carrying its own title) underneath the entire poem’s overall title. Thus, the poem “Settlements” includes four numbered sections that run a total of seven pages. The result reads with the intensity of image and the pace one expects in a lyric poem, yet it also carries some of the reach of an essay. It’s demanding reading, but it’s also rewarding. Here is a fragment from the middle of section III, titled “Well”:

So when I turn to say, at times like this,
that something else is with us all along
I’m thinking of that woman in the town
who told me how she worked all afternoon,
she and her husband digging in the heat, bees
drifting back and forth through currant stands,
the sound of their breathing
meshed with the weave and spin
of swallows:
how, after an hour, they struck on an unexpected
flagstone of granite
and lifted the lid on a coal-black
circle of fresh spring water under the stone, … (p. 52)

In a way, the quoted lines above almost describe the reading process for a Burnside poem. It requires pleasant work (“digging in the heat, bees / drifting back and forth through currant stands”). Rewarding for itself, it can lead to discoveries entirely unexpected (“a coal-black / circle of fresh spring water…”).

* * *

In what is called the western tradition, questions of home – which are also always questions of identity – have vexed us at least since Eve and Adam were expelled. If that wasn’t bad enough, Galileo proved the Earth was not the center of the solar system, Darwin determined that evolution made everything from amoebae to human beings, and Einstein posited that the universe can be compared to a huge rubber sheet each planet weights down differently according to its gravity. Now there are rumors everything from basalt to a child’s tear is made of unimaginably tiny vibrating strings. In short, home gets harder and harder to figure. If to this we add the contemporary commonplace assumptions that each of us must, for our own happiness, choose our own occupation, belief system, ethics, place of residence, and relationship (if any) to our kin or ancestry, then perhaps it’s no surprise how much effort home asks of us in its construction. The times ask us to construct our own ad hoc myths (the alternative, one supposes, is to bob on the waves of entertainment and advertising).

One could argue that home – in all its making and unmaking, its deceptive calms and sudden storms – constitutes John Burnside’s essential interest in his Selected Poems. It’s a big subject – place, animals, people, the relationships they assert, the sense of something larger than ourselves as immediate as a view of ocean or sky, leavings and arrivals, the company of history, the company of neighbors, the observation of beauty, the daily “finding evidence of life in all this / driftwork…” (p. 89). Burnside’s Selected succeeds partly because he has learned ways to make poems that let in so much experience – either as he knows it firsthand or via his intelligent imagination. To read this book as a book is to watch technique grow and become surer, more supple, more attuned to the ambitions of the poem or the requirements of its material. By its end, the book moves deftly from long poems in numbered sections to single page poems, like “The Good Neighbor,” which read over and over as absolutely right in construction and deeply humane in sensibility.