THE INDIANA DUNES REVEALED: The Art of Frank V. Dudley

I always have held a strong belief in the close connections between painting and poetry. Even more than the other literary forms of expression, poetry writing, especially of lyric pieces, parallels the artist’s process in a number of ways. Both usually attempt to still a section from a larger context while hinting at actions before or after the frozen moment. Each wishes to vividly portray a scene so that the elements suggest a story or evoke a particular emotion. Perspective becomes crucial to obtaining a true understanding of the subject under scrutiny, and a compact presentation appears just as necessary in a lyrical poem as it may be in a framed painting.

Neither the lyric poet nor the painter, whether depicting landscape or offering portraiture, possesses the luxury of introducing extended exposition or narrative complexity. Instead, the visual harmony or contrast of objects gathered by the poet and artist must imply associations through connotation or symbolism for readers and viewers. Historically, poets and painters frequently have socialized and compared notes, whether in Paris cafés or Greenwich Village taverns.

As I have stated in a previous essay, Ernest Hemingway once confessed, “I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers.” James Whistler thought of his artwork as “the poetry of sight.” Over the last couple of centuries, one can clearly witness an evident influence upon poetry by various movements in the art world, including Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. My study of painting, particularly landscape and impressionist works of art, has aided me in understanding composition and placement of details in the images that fill my poems. I am fond of the Luminist painters who depicted subtle variations in landscape or seascape paintings, especially any gradual differentiation of color or light in images of sea or sky. I always advise my creative writing students to stop off at the art museum almost as often as they visit the library.

Indeed, the cooperation and enthusiastic support of officials at Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum of Art over the years have enhanced local appreciation for the conscious linking of poetry and paintings. Poetry readings by visiting writers and students occur in the magnificent atmosphere of the museum’s main gallery each year. Surrounded by the brilliantly imaginative scenes filling canvases arrayed for the current exhibition, the poets’ visual descriptions seem to enjoy proper company.

A little more than a decade ago, the director, Richard Brauer, for whom the museum is named, and I teamed to present an anthology of ekphrastic poetry by Valparaiso authors responding to an exhibition of Charles Burchfield paintings. Of course, ekphrastic poetry—pieces written in response to specific works of art, either as an attempt to render a new insightful interpretation or as an exercise in which the poet playfully creates an alternative vision simply inspired by another’s original painting, sculpture, or other object of art—has achieved great popularity in recent times, but the genre has always been present and often has been responsible for valuable contributions, from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats to “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” by John Ashbery, just to name a couple.

More recently, since the Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue, Valparaiso Poetry Review has been fortunate to have Gregg Hertzlieb, Richard Brauer’s successor as museum director, supplying regular commentary on cover artwork for the journal. Gregg is a poet (whose “Scraper” appears in Volume III, Number 1 of VPR) as well as a visual artist (the Volume VI, Number 2 issue of VPR highlights his artwork, Fare), and he conscientiously emphasizes continual connections seen between poetry and painting.

One noted artist, Frank V. Dudley, whose painting, Shadows and Sunlit Silence, graced the cover of the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of VPR, appears to intentionally blend poetic vision with his own stunning visual performance, even to the point of purposely using poetic titles for his pieces. As Gregg Hertzlieb wrote in his VPR commentary on Dudley’s painting: “The title Shadows and Sunlit Silence offers an example of alliteration that enhances an appreciation for the picture. The ‘sh’ and ‘s’ sounds summon up images within one's imagination of shifting sands and rustling grasses.”

The appearance of Dudley’s art as the cover for Valparaiso Poetry Review coincided with a major showing of his work in the Brauer Museum of Art. Consequently, a wonderful book, The Indiana Dunes Revealed, has resulted from that exhibition as well. As the copy for this volume explains: “The Indiana Dunes Revealed offers the first comprehensive examination of a widely collected, much loved, and ecologically significant artist. Described by art historian William Gerdts as ‘one of the finest painters working in the Midwest in the first decades of the twentieth century,’ Frank V. Dudley (1868-1957) was a native of Wisconsin who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before going on to establish a long exhibition record both there and across the country. He also dedicated over forty years of his professional life as a landscape painter to the promotion and preservation of the Indiana Dunes. Today, thanks in part to Dudley’s efforts, this unique geographical region enjoys state and federal protection and provides ecologists from around the world with a living laboratory unlike anything else.”

The Indiana Dunes Revealed features “150 color and 70 black-and-white images,” and “it celebrates Dudley’s unique artistic legacy, documents the exhibition, and demonstrates the painter’s importance to environmentalists and naturalists, especially during the many years of national debate over the designation of parts of the dunes as a national park. In some areas, Dudley’s painting may be the only record of a lost dunescape, and as the struggle between development and preservation continues, his enduring art reminds us of the need for a sustainable environment for the Great Lakes.”

The authors of this fine volume are James R. Dabbert, senior lecturer in English at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago; Richard H. W. Brauer, emeritus director of the Brauer Museum of Art; Gregg Hertzlieb, director/curator of the Brauer Museum of Art; independent art historian Wendy Greenhouse; William Gerdts, professor emeritus of art history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York; Joan Gibb Engel, activist and writer on Dunes ecology; and J. Ronald Engel, professor of social ethics at Meadville Theological School of Lombard College, and the author of Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes.

The Indiana Dunes Revealed: The Art of Frank V. Dudley, University of Illinois Press, 2006

Maxine Kumin: JACK AND OTHER NEW POEMS

This week as the tragic situation unfolded at the Blacksburg, Virginia campus of Virginia Tech, and the death toll scrolling across the news reports climbed even higher, I just happened to be re-reading Maxine Kumin’s Jack and Other New Poems, a book that includes a piece titled “Historic Blacksburg, Virginia.” Although this particular poem remarks upon reminders of past racism in that part of the country (“The lavatory sign still reads / Colored on one side and White / on the other”)—an era of attitudes thankfully no longer prevalent for the area, as indicated by the diversity of the names on this week’s list of victims and by the faces of the professors interviewed—most of the rest of the book addresses issues of life and death that appeared appropriate reading at this time and deserving of some comment.

When encountering Maxine Kumin’s poetry, one can sometimes become lulled by the steady and resolute direction of her unpretentious sentences. Whether guided by traditional forms and a regular rhyme or filled with the more relaxed sense of free verse, Kumin’s work normally ends up engaging the reader as she steers the content toward a determined end. Even the patterns in her poems, deliberate meditations on nature or mortality and dramatic pieces reflecting personal or political perspectives, rarely seem very surprising and are hardly suspenseful. Yet, this poet’s usually careful control of language and overriding tone frequently prove persuasive enough to enlighten and enrich.

With Jack and Other New Poems, her fifteenth volume of poetry, Kumin continues to offer work similar to that which has delighted readers for decades, especially since her Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection, Up Country, in 1973. This new book begins and ends with sonnets, yet even in her more formal poems she manages to present a relaxed or informal voice, one with a lyricism that invites listeners and a rationale that reassures readers. Now in her eighties, Maxine Kumin often maintains a lively and engaging monologue in which one witnesses a mixture of her wisdom and her wit.

The wisdom arrives from a lifetime of observing the relationship between humans and nature. Like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, Kumin has learned the lessons provided by elements in her environment. Although at times expressing herself in the urbane and sophisticated language one might associate with the Philadelphia or Boston of her early years, she now clearly seems more a product of rural New Hampshire, the location which she adopted as her home in the mid-1970s when she and her husband bought a farm for breeding horses.

Indeed, the title poem of this book refers to one of those horses named Jack, which the poet recounts letting go in 1980 “to a neighbor I thought was a friend,” only to learn later that the horse had been sold “down the river” to others. The speaker concedes she still feels remorse: “Every year, the end of summer / lazy and golden, invites grief and regret.” In the most haunting lines of the piece, the poet records: “my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons / the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.”

With this poem, Maxine Kumin conveys one tone that carries through the collection, a persistent and continually gathering realization of loss or absence, an increased awareness of one’s own mortality. In a poignant poem titled “Last Days,” the speaker begins by informing readers about her sustained long-distance friendship with a dying college classmate even after so many years have passed since their student days at Radcliffe: “We visit by phone as the morphine haze / retreats, late afternoon, most days. / Our mingled past is set against the pinhole lights / of cars cruising the blacked-out streets.”

She remembers those times when these college friends, along with two others, would be “ironing our blouses with Peter Pan collars / to wear on dates with those 90-day Wonders, / ensigns in training for the Second World War / in the Business School across the Charles River.” Before the close of the poem, the speaker recalls: “Now BJ is gone, and Hettie. You have, they say, / only days.” As the friend faces her final journey, the poet knows she would like to offer as much assistance and comfort as she can: “I want to go with you / as far as the border. I want to support you.”

“Women and Horses,” perhaps the most dramatic work drawing on death and loss, opens with an epigraph (“After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric. Theodore Adorno”) followed by a litany of horrific events in history experienced during the poet’s lifetime: “After Auschwitz: after ten of my father’s kin— / the ones who stayed—starved, then were gassed in the camps. / After Vietnam, after Korea, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan. / After the Towers.”

As one might expect from Maxine Kumin, she wishes to counter the catastrophes created by her fellow humans with an art that asks us to view anew this “haplessly orbiting world” in which we find ourselves: “If there’s a lyre around, strike it!” The speaker recognizes the death and destruction she has beheld over the decades, and she cannot deny the “dark and degrading past” from which we will never escape; however, she rejects the notion in the Adorno quote, and instead requests more poetry, asks for work that hails life: “let us celebrate whatever scraps the muse, that naked child, / can pluck from the still moldering dumps.”

This spirit appears natural for a woman who not too long ago miraculously survived a near-fatal accident when a horse bolted during a carriage-driving incident. She appreciates each day and savors what life has to offer, especially in the form of nature’s gifts. Indeed, she relishes life of any kind, and some of her poems address inhuman behavior towards animals. In “Which One,” the speaker inquires about who “discarded in a bag // —sealed with duct tape—in the middle of the road / three puppies four or five weeks old.”

Elsewhere, the poet notes damage that occurs simply from the conflict created when humans or animals trespass on one another’s terrain: “a deer / that chanced the metal barrier / —unforeseen by Darwin—between nature / and the internal combustion engine / lies on its side, burst open” (“Requiem on I-89”). However, even here, the speaker notes the cyclical pattern of life and death in nature as crows peck at the protein of the deer’s carcass: “such sated caws, such croaks of sorrow.”

Perhaps Maxine Kumin’s constant examination of issues concerning life and death becomes enhanced by her admission in “Getting There” that she is an atheist. In another poem she lightly writes: “Where any of us is / going in tomorrow’s reckless Lexus is / the elemental mystery.” As one who does not believe in God or, apparently, an afterlife, Kumin may place greater stake in the conditions of the life we have in this world. She also may have a different determination about the ultimate meaning of death as her poetry bravely prepares the speaker for the deaths of others, but also for her eventual end: “I want to sing / of death unbruised. / Its smoothening. / I want to prepare for death’s arrival / in my life” (“Summer Meditation”). She concludes: “If only death could be / like going to the movies. / You get up afterward / and go out / saying, how was it? / Tell me, tell me how it was.”

Throughout this collection, though one may not be startled by the content in individual pieces, the cumulative effect of the works from start to finish does quietly astonish. Maxine Kumin’s poetry is at its best when it amazes with its subtle structure and calm voice, allowing for the clarity of her wisdom accompanied by a fair amount of wit. At times, the poems do lose the strength evident in her formal poems or freer pieces with short lyrical lines. In works like “Appropriate Tools: An Elegy and Rant” and “The Jew Order” Kumin lengthens her lines and loosens the syntax of her sentences to the point that they read almost as prose, sometimes shifting from wisdom to didacticism and missing the delicate impact her more compact poems deliver. In addition, her informal plain-spoken voice occasionally slips into words that seem too cute for the content, as when she writes the first three lines in the following from “Summer Meditation”: “there goes mr. big / the brookie / trailed by mrs. big / wispy silhouettes / darting in synchrony / past the deep pool.”

Nevertheless, Kumin’s few persona poems that assume stronger voices obviously not her own may be included among the most striking pieces in this collection. “Inge, in Rehab” vividly describes a desperate and defeated woman with an eating disorder (“It hurts at first / sticking fingers down your throat. / Vomiting’s an art.”), whose normal body functions have been damaged: “I haven’t bled since I was sixteen.” She has taken to shoplifting as well, anything she can get her hands on, and confides to readers her social worker’s advice: “I need to / learn to love myself / but it’s too late for that.”

In “The Rapist Speaks: A Prison Interview,” another potent persona poem, Kumin reports the recommendations to women by a rapist about how to avoid becoming his victims: “A woman with buzz cut / makes a lousy target. // I look for something I can nail— / a braid, a ponytail— // and loose clothes that rip.” This poem seems even more eerie and unnatural since its disturbing message is written in rhyming couplets leading through the poem toward the confirmation that this stalking rapist can now only be satisfied by killing his victim: “but life went from bad to worse. / Now I need to use force. // This time I had to kill to come. / Got enough? Take your notes and go home.” This perceived need of a stalker to kill seems to weigh especially heavily again in the wake of the last week’s revelations about the killer at Virginia Tech.

Elsewhere, Kumin writes about the 2003 news story concerning “the demented father / who murdered his children and buried them somewhere / along I-80.” In the poem, Kumin declares that since her Radcliffe freshman readings in a “Bible-and-Shakespeare course”: “Sin. Good. Evil. Obedience. How to get saved from Hell have travelled around with me.” Literature has been her guide, perhaps something to comfort her through times witnessing inexplicable acts of humans.

In “Women and Horses” Maxine Kumin correctly contradicted Adorno’s statement that poetry could not be written after incidents of deep tragedy. In fact, literature communicating wisdom about life and death may matter most at such moments. Coincidentally, I must acknowledge most of Kumin’s poems in this volume provided for me some small but necessary comfort during the recent week’s social narratives in which all were seeking for themselves the right responses to senseless violence or evil actions, a difficult period in which everyone seemed to be hoping to find an enlightened and insightful understanding about the value of life in the presence of death spoken with wise words that might guide us forward.

Kumin, Maxine. Jack and Other New Poems. Norton, 2005.

Paul Hostovsky: VERSE DAILY's Web Monthly Feature

Valparaiso Poetry Review is pleased to note that Paul Hostovsky's "Bagpiper Among the Geese," from Volume VIII, Number 2 (the Spring/Summer 2007 issue) of VPR, has been selected as the April Web Monthly Feature poem at Verse Daily.

Congratulations to Paul Hostovsky!

Derek Walcott: THE PRODIGAL

When as a young man Derek Walcott, already a poet and artist, first traveled from his home of St. Lucia in the Caribbean, and he engaged in what would become an extended journey on and off over five decades of wandering through the great cities of Western civilization, he knew he was seeking to vastly expand the scope of his personal experiences or to possess a wider array of cultural understanding. “It is only afterwards that these things are ours,” he explains in The Prodigal. Consequently, he must have believed his writing would be enriched by such exposure to the variety of international cultural institutions, historic locations, and peoples he encountered along the way. “We read, we travel, we become.”

However, it probably could not have been possible for him to foresee the concern, perhaps even guilt (“my craft’s irony was in betrayal”), he eventually might develop over the long stretches of separation from his beloved native island, as well as away from its inhabitants, for which he was has maintained great affection and to whom he has continued to display devotion in his work over the decades. “Christ, over fifty years. Half a century!” he exclaims as he approaches the closing of the book-length poem and a young waitress triggers his memory so that he envisions the youthful image of his “first love— / the jutting lower lip, its provocative pout, / the streaks of blond hair.”

Ninety pages into the poem, the speaker acknowledges what readers have witnessed often throughout the book: “there was only one subject—Time.” For the poet, time has moved too quickly. It has robbed him of his youth and taken a toll on his health. It has affected his emotional state along with his corporeal condition. It has led to the death of his brother and the arrival of continual consciousness about the inevitable end of his own life. The poet even proposes in the final pages: “In what will be your last book make each place / as if it had just been made, already old, / but new again from naming it.”

Further, Walcott hints that he worries soon the passage of time will hinder his ability to produce fine poetry: “Be happy: you’re writing from the privilege / of all your wits about you in your old age.” Art—in this case, poetry—presents an opportunity to halt time. Within its lines, the poem stills moments and preserves the lives of people or places important to the poet. In fact, Walcott’s fixation on the concept of time can be demonstrated with an earlier passage from the poem, where the narrator mentions the word “time” over and over again: “And time is measuring my grandchildren’s cries / and time outpaces the sepia water / of the racing creek, time takes its leisure, cunning . . ..”

Even when he has been physically apart from the land of his childhood, in volume after volume Derek Walcott has revisited the familiar setting and depicted its individuals. Frequently, the center of this poet’s spiritual map has been easy to detect (“of all the cities of the world, this is your centre”); however, his geographical and spiritual distance from that spot sometimes has also caused consternation. In The Prodigal, as the title suggests, Walcott recalls a number of his restless adventures, mostly in the United States and Europe, and then he returns once again to the beaches and seascapes where he began a lifelong exploration of external or internal topographies, each filled with characteristic features for which his work has become famous: “Not a new coast, but home.”

Walcott’s fame came as the result of the repeated production of magnificent poetry, especially as witnessed in ambitious and lengthy projects—most notably Omeros (1990), his epic poem paralleling the Odyssey but with contemporary Caribbean characters and an island atmosphere. For his literary achievements, Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992. As Walcott notes in The Prodigal, acclaim, with its rewards and responsibilities, also created greater separation from his homeland: “approbation had made me an exile.”

Near the end of this poem extending more than 100 pages, the speaker reveals an attitude toward the renown he has earned throughout his career: “Gradually it hardens, the death-mask of Fame.” Indeed, an awareness of one’s mortality and a desire to mark another’s death provide motives for the meditative language within this work. Repeatedly, Walcott recounts ways in which he feels his body’s aging: “the detached tooth from a lower denture / the thick fog I cannot pierce without my glasses / the shot of pain from a kidney / these piercings of acute mortality.”

Often, Walcott associates memories of certain times or cities with the many women he has known (“women who contained their cities”), and he expresses anxiety over his inability to attract beautiful women as he once had. In a particularly moving passage, he also recalls the violent death of one of those lovely women, a military figure he had met: “A shot rang out and the green Vespa skidded / off the curb into a ditch below a fence / of rusty cactus and the beautiful soldier lay / on the dry grass verge staring at the blue sky / with its puffs of clouds like echoes of an ambush.” Finally, returning to the site of his youth, the narrator is even reminded of his initial love: “how she walked / with her sunburnt hands against the sea-almonds, / to a remembered cove, where she stood on the small dock— / that was when I thought we were immortal.”

As readers discover deep within the book, Walcott’s sense of his own mortality arises from the recent death of his twin brother, Roddy, notification of which he writes about in the shockingly plain language of a matter-of-fact message: “I read this. / March 11. 8:35 a.m. Guadalajara. Saturday. / Roddy. Cremated today.” However, the poet’s powers of observation and perception quickly transition to more descriptive sentences: “The streets and trees of Mexico covered with ash. / Your soul, my twin, keeps fluttering in my head, / a hummingbird, bewildered by the rafters, / barred by a pane that shows a lucent heaven.”

After this revelation halfway through the volume, the poem’s structure seems surer, and the emotional intensity of the poetry immediately increases; consequently, so does the psychological tension. As seems to be the case for the persona in this poem, readers discover greater purpose and passion when the speaker nears the familiar settings and lush scenery of his beginnings, even while he draws toward the end of his life.

Indeed, many of the first fifty pages in this poem involve chronicles of the speaker’s travels: New York, Boston, Italy, Germany, the Alps, etc. The memoirist style of poetry, reporting the poet’s movements and cataloging events, brings to my mind Charles Wright’s European journal poems; however, one swiftly wants to recognize additional connections to examples by other earlier modern poets, perhaps all the way back to Wordsworth.

Still, what plot exists owes itself to the parable from which the book’s title is drawn. The poet, stunned by his brother’s passing and encouraged by his own aging, elects to exit the world he has adopted for decades so that he might revisit the site where he and his twin had spent delightful days together: “So has it come to this, to have to choose?” In the long span of time away from his beloved island with its ocean horizon, Walcott frequently has sought joy and sanctuary in language (“nouns that have stayed / to keep me company in my old age”), especially in his poetry (“The line is my horizon. / I cannot be happier than this”), or in other forms of art (“Museums are the refuge of the prodigal”). In the process, his poems also have provided considerable pleasure or comfort for others.

Derek Walcott’s poetry has always been an ambitious art—with admirable works usually unsuitable as anthology pieces—that requires of readers great patience and long undivided deliberation, but which ultimately rewards readers with its lyricism and inventive language investigating important themes. The rich texture in the lines delights and surprises with its similes or metaphors. Rarely does a poet employ these techniques more than Walcott. He even may be accused on occasion of over-layering his imagery too much, burdening lines with more similes and metaphors than they can adequately handle, exhibiting a cleverness that causes unnecessary complexity and confounds rather than illuminates, or that needlessly diverts attention toward its presentation of elaborate description and away from the cogent content. Indeed, he humorously speaks to his readers’ expectations for extravagant illustration and remarks at one point in the poem just before embarking on further embellishment: “And now, you think: he is going to describe it.”

Nevertheless, The Prodigal contains a powerful and compelling examination into the thoughts of an aged man assessing his emotional condition and into the psychological reflections of a premier poet contemplating his mortality: “Old man coming through the glass, who are you? / I am you. Learn to acknowledge me, / the cottony white hair, the heron-shanks, / and, when you and your reflection bend, / the leaf-green eyes under the dented forehead, / do you think Time makes exceptions, do you think / Death mutters, ‘Maybe I’ll skip this one’? / the same silent consequence that crept across / your brother perilously sleeping, and all the others / whose silence is no different from your brother’s.”

Confronted by the death of his twin, the poet reconciles his self-image to his image in the glass: “the train window where you sat / through which you saw the ghost that is now your face.” He returns home to address his own eventual demise, and in turn is inspired to write this work with epic and elegiac tendencies. In the book’s final lines, as the speaker sails once more the seas off the shore of his island accompanied by “Angels and dolphins, the second, first,” celebrating through memory the life of his brother (“my twin, my dolphin”), he now knows that he also approaches the close of his own time, and the last line of poetry transforms into a glorious lifeline indicating the path forward, illuminating the way to the opposite side: “that line of light that shines from the other shore.”

Walcott, Derek. The Prodigal. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Mark Strand: MAN AND CAMEL

By mere coincidence rather than any overt intention to connect the holy days to a specific text, this weekend I found myself returning to read again Mark Strand’s latest collection of poetry, Man and Camel, which includes as its culmination an extended piece concerning the crucifixion of Christ. “Poem After the Seven Last Words,” commissioned by the Brentano String Quartet, originally was written to accompany a performance of Haydn’s quartet opus 51, titled “The Seven Last Words of Christ.” The poet’s contribution contains seven sections, designed so that each part would be read between the music’s movements. In Strand’s notes on the poem, he also reports the content “relies heavily on the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.”

Certainly, if one considers poets who produce work associated with religious themes or theological philosophy, Mark Strand’s name does not naturally rise to the top of such a list. Indeed, even in this instance, the poet’s approach to his subject matter appears reverent but appropriately distant, continually controlled by an apparent attempt at gathering together a series of scenes or statements that evoke emotion and initiate thought, but which avoid any of the overly wrought language one might expect in some religious verse or the intense imagery of a vivid Mel Gibson movie version.

“Poem After the Seven Last Words,” which fills the final of this book’s three sections, displays some of the subtly lyrical and restrained meditative language Strand has demonstrated in previous volumes, although in those instances the persona spoke of incidents or relationships mostly provided by personal experience. In this piece, the poet shows readers narrative moments or dramatic situations the way a painter might set colors and shapes beside one another, arranging elements separately on a canvas then standing back to contemplate their cumulative impact. In fact, at times the imagery even seems cinematic, as if a camera has panned across a fictional landscape: “a dreamt-of place / where the muttering wind shifts over the white lawns / and riffles the leaves of trees, the high trees / that are streaked with gold and line the walkways there.”

However, the speaker concedes such scenery sometimes supplies false hope, especially in “the days of spring when the sky is filled / with the odor of lilac, when darkness becomes desire.” The poet knows nature’s beauty combined with human nature can act to conceal harsh realities, particularly our own mortality: “the world’s great gift for fiction gilds even / the dirt we walk on, and we feel we could live forever / while knowing of course that we can’t.” Indeed, although this long poem addresses the death of Christ, it also serves as a reminder to everyone of the inevitability of an end for all: “No one escapes. / Not even the man who believed he was chosen to do so.”

Therefore, in a certain sense, the narrative of this poem leads to one conclusion, already suggested in the poem’s opening lines: “The story of the end, of the last word / of the end, when told, is a story that never ends.” Although spoken about the sacrifice of Christ, Strand’s poem more importantly forces each of us to examine our own fate in the face of an uncertainty we all encounter. “Such is our plight,” the narrator declares, as we are left with the realization, “at last that nothing is more real than nothing.” By the last lines of the final section, the closing sentences of the collection, Strand’s narrator acknowledges and accepts his destined end, “what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand / has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart. / To that place, to the keeper of that place, I commit myself.”

This declaration becomes more compelling when one recalls earlier poems in Man and Camel that grapple with the concept of one’s own death. In “My Name,” the piece that closes section two and serves as a perfect transition to the third section, the poem again paints the scenery with its initial lines: “Once when the lawn was a golden green / and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials / in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed / with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass.” The speaker retreats to a time long ago when the terrain of his life lay ahead like an unmapped territory. He recalls hearing his own “name, as if for the first time.” Bestowed with an identity at first verifies one’s existence; however, later recognizing one’s mortality, the speaker concludes: “it belonged not to me but to the silence / from which it had come and to which it would go.”

Elsewhere in the collection, despite an apparent attempted avoidance of thoughts about mortality, an eventual awareness of one’s death opens a poem: “I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me” (“2002”). The name of the poem’s persona is later spoken, its revelation diminishing any division between the speaker and the poet, as Death “strokes / his beard, and says, ‘I’m thinking of Strand.’” In “2032,” Strand again personifies “Death, who used to love me,” and his figure is depicted almost as a cross between the personifications of Death by Emily Dickinson and Woody Allen.

As readers often have seen in Strand’s poetry, the poet focuses on impermanence and nothingness, the void one temporarily inhabits in this life. Even in “The Webern Variations,” another commissioned piece by the Brentano String Quartet, during lines citing the language of leaving or loss for which Strand has become well known over the last four decades, the poet alludes to absence and endings: “Into the heart of nothing, / into the radiant hollows, / even the language of vanishing / leaves itself behind.” In fact, in one section of this piece, Strand’s enigmatic words seem reminiscent of those from one of his most famous and most anthologized early poems, “Keeping Things Whole,” written nearly forty-five years ago. There, the poet discloses how “the air moves in / to fill the spaces / where my body’s been.” He confides his “reasons / for moving. I move / to keep things whole.” Here, the speaker asks: “What should we hear but the voice / that would be ours shaping itself, / the secret voice of being telling us / that where we disappear is where we are?”

The other night when I brought home bright yellow roses to lighten our dining room during Easter, I thought of a poem in this book that reads almost as if it were a parable. “The Rose” opens with another image of the transitory nature of life and beauty: “Twisted in a field of weeds, the helpless rose / felt the breeze of paradise just once, then died.” However, the poem also explores one’s sense of self, as well as a contrast between the figurative language of art and the literalness of encountered reality. When children mourn the loss of the rose, they are encouraged to look with imagination into a pond at their own reflections, and are asked: “Do you see it, / its petals open, rising to the surface, turning into you?” But the response offered by the innocents demonstrates clarity of vision, seeing what exists for what it is, not hampered or fooled by creativity: “‘Oh no,’ they said. ‘We are what we are—nothing else.’”

Contrary to that view, the poet usually chooses to conceive of an alternative perception of the world, often one in which he requests readers visualize a rearranged reality. Indeed, Strand’s reputation as a writer who likes to employ surrealist images and actions in his work continues in this volume, especially in the selection of poems for the book’s first section. As I have written about before in a longer essay for Valparaiso Poetry Review, Strand’s poetry could be split into three categories—short surrealist lyrics, introspective poems of personal reflection, and more intricate meditative works. Likewise, the poems in Man and Camel appear partitioned somewhat into three sections mirroring these types of poetry.

The title poem fits into the first section as a typical surrealist piece in which humor and absurdity are employed for effect and the poem closes with a final phrase or sentence akin to a punch line. In this poem a speaker who pauses to smoke a cigarette on his porch is approached by a man and a camel. The two drift down his street toward the edge of town as they begin to sing: “Into the desert / they went and as they went their voices / rose as one above the sifting sound / of windblown snow.” When the speaker seeks to place meaning upon their appearance, to find additional significance, the pair confront him and protest: “They stood before my porch, / staring up at me with beady eyes, and said: ‘You ruined it. You ruined it forever.’”

On occasions like this, Strand seems to suggest readers should enjoy imagined art for what it presents rather than analyzing for underlying layers of messages or self-fulfillment. Nevertheless, an irony presents itself, as no poet’s poems invite such scrutiny any more than Mark Strand’s surrealist lyrics. Yet, Strand’s comical and self-mocking poems, whether they are funny fables or bizarre vignettes, frequently seem to me the least engaging upon repeated readings, sounding almost like old jokes told a second time. Even the elliptical phrases from the first section that at times appear reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s poetry do not linger as long or as well as the more meditative and introspective monologues later in the collection might. In fact, one wishes this volume’s title instead spotlighted an example of the more substantial poems from the last two sections of the book.

Unlike the works in section one that remind readers of Strand’s earliest surrealist poetry or his brief pieces of fiction, poems in the second section of this volume sometimes revisit the wonderful narrative monologues witnessed previously in The Story of Our Lives, Blizzard of One, and elsewhere. In “Black Sea” a speaker stands at night on the roof of his house: “under a sky / strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it, / the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming / like bits of lace tossed in the air.” Staring off, as “slow swells of the sea / break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear” (and echoing language also seen in “Poem After the Seven Last Words”—“the dark became desire”), the speaker eloquently remembers the nearness of one who was absent. In “Mother and Son” the speaker recalls mortality and loss once again as he makes a deathbed visit: “The son leans down to kiss / the mother’s lips, but her lips are cold. / The burial of feelings has begun.”

The persona in “Mirror” reports a party where he “was standing with some friends / under a large gilt-framed mirror / that tilted slightly forward / over the fireplace.” The metaphor of the mirror as an instrument for reflection provides opportunities for the speaker’s introspection as he notices “a woman in a green dress leaned / against the far wall.” She also appears to be gazing into the mirror, he confides, “but past me, into a space / that might be filled by someone / yet to arrive.” However, friends suggest it is time to move on, and now a long time later he still remembers “seeing the woman stare past me / into a place I could only imagine.” Perhaps a chance has been lost, since when he recalls the incident, “each time it is with a pang, / as if just then I were stepping / from the depths of the mirror / into that white room, breathless and eager, / only to discover too late / that she is not there.” The fleeting image of the woman might remind one favorably of the famous anecdote, told during a scene from Citizen Kane, about the brief glimpse of a woman in a white dress seen on a passing ferry remembered by a character nearly fifty years later, who confesses, “I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

Much of Man and Camel concerns one’s contemplation of the past, as well as its influence on the present, and one’s confrontation with the future accompanied by an increasing awareness of the inevitability of death. The poet continually links passage of time with feelings of love and loss or desire and desperation. One comes to understand the kinds of destruction done by time’s passing, as even each exhalation of air escaping the body may be seen to be a measurement of mortality: “the first / gray flags of their breath being lifted away” (“People Walking Through the Night”).

One of the great strengths in this volume is its ability to allay anxiety even while elevating recognition of human limitations through the offering of often disturbing messages. Indeed, the personae in these poems themselves sometimes seem to be seeking comfort or consolation in their conclusions, although they are persistently preparing for more ominous moments ahead. Additionally, readers of Mark Strand’s poetry who search for solace to soothe their spirits in Man and Camel, despite the presence of humor or an assuring tone of language, might instead eventually discover distress in some of the poems’ surprising and discomforting disclosures about the complex circumstances of our lives and deaths, “the secret voice of being telling us / that where we disappear is where we are.”

Strand, Mark. Man and Camel. Knopf, 2006.

Leslie Heywood: THE PROVING GROUNDS

Leafing through the work in Leslie Heywood’s premiere book of poetry, The Proving Grounds, one quickly becomes accustomed to uncovering sometimes uncomfortable and intimate details about the lives of the personae, often obviously representing the poet, in each piece’s personal narrative. In the process, readers discover a compelling cumulative effect created during the series of revelations by the poems’ speakers about private moments and close relationships. Indeed, Heywood, who includes among her previous publications the autobiographical Pretty Good for a Girl, presents in her first collection of poetry a set of mostly confessional poems that taken together resemble a series of memoirs.

Poetry in The Proving Grounds mostly chronicles dramatic moments during various stages of one woman’s development from a young daughter in a troubled household through years as an athlete to her lingering difficulties as she assumes the role of mother toward her own daughter. Chronologically, the initial poem opens in 1969—a year of tragedies, including “Altamonte, / All those shootings”—and the narrator is pictured at the age of five with her two-year-old sister, part of a family finding themselves trapped in their own tragic circumstances: “We four caught here in a passion / Of paradise starting to break” (“Pixels”).

The poet focuses on a father whose angry violence threatens the other members of the family and eventually creates an estrangement between him and his daughter. Even when remembering scenes one would hope to be tranquil, the speaker recalls: “alcohol in your blood / Was on the rise. And in its rise your rage” (“Canadian Geese”). By the time of the poem “1973,” the daughter now about nine—“the oldest, always first”—leads her sister to rescue their mother from a drunken and bullying father who declares: “If you want to get her / You’re going to have to go through me.”

In another poem, readers learn the extent of the father’s ferocity as he believes the “mother, his bosses, / And everyone else had failed him, until the doors / My mother locked to keep him out / Were shattered by his fists. The year / He broke her bedroom door six times / She decided to leave” (“Repair Shop”). Years later, the distance between father and daughter is revisited in “Telescope,” where the speaker believes she always had disappointed him: “Me, your daughter, // Never tall enough, smart enough, a rag mussed up, / My skin and voice too rough. You look at me from the end // Of a telescope lens, miles away in that cool gaze.”

A second poem that references 1973 (also the year of Secretariat), “Triple Crown” recounts how the speaker discovered her interest in running, physically and metaphorically: “Nine years old, I lowered my head, / Began to run.” As she grows older and stronger, the narrator lengthens her runs and gains an ardor for the sport, as well as a desire for the local attention she receives from “newspapers, / Cameras, local news.” “But not enough,” she reveals and repeats the phrase a number of times in the piece, as her passion becomes obsession and turns into an opportunity for a college scholarship.

A total focus on her sport requires sacrifices. As a high school athlete, she and her teammates “were the girls / Who never went to the prom.” Instead, in “Prom Girls” she reports how they prepare for a meet that would lead to making “Nationals.” Even when seriously injured and told she’d “never run again,” the speaker quickly overcomes her “spinal cord compressions” to win an invitational competition “four weeks later.” The persona fears a loss of the recognition attained by winning races, perhaps even displays anxiety about a consequent absence of personal identity: “As soon as you stop / You are discarded / Like the bodies of Christmas trees / Dragged to the edge of the street” (“What Scares Me”).

However, at nineteen this runner’s body begins to fail. She experiences a series of fevers accompanied by other recurring symptoms: “The joints of my hands, knees, frozen / Like an old machine ground to a screech/ And then a stop.” Nevertheless, despite “Mixed Connective Tissue Disease,” the speaker needs to continue, since the activity has become her life and livelihood: “I ran like I breathed, / Ran because it paid my tuition and rent” (“Runner’s High”). Even as a runner, the speaker in Heywood’s poems attempts to please an older male, her track coach: “I ran for him. I’d do most anything he’d say” (“Burning My Virginity by Wendy’s”). Nevertheless, she seems destined to fail and to feel she let him down, as she slows when she finds her “steps starting to stutter and shake.” She is abandoned again when the older coach drives his “Ford Fairmont” off in disappointment and anger: “I watched its tailpipe shake / As he burned out of the parking lot / Into the street across from / The Jiffy Lube and Wendy’s, like the violence / Of anyone’s first time.”

Later, the poetry’s persona switches her physical obsession to power-lifting weights and bodybuilding, training with “the men, the studs, the boys” (“From the Bench-Press Meet”). In some sense, the desire to enhance her strength and compete with men seems a logical extension of an ongoing inner conflict evidenced by some speakers in Heywood’s poetry, a struggle concerning feelings of inadequacy with self-esteem due to instances of apparent disregard by others or inequality in treatment because of her gender.

This difficulty begins with an inability to please her father, even as a child proudly bringing home high grades, when he responds to his daughter: “anyone who takes such easy classes would certainly get all A’s” (“Telescope”). On the other hand, at school her teacher reinforces feelings of discomfort by publicly using the good grades by her “to mock the boys” (“How I Learned World History”). The lesson taught in her history classroom becomes one about a society in which boys are often informed they should be embarrassed to be outperformed by girls: “losing to one of us / Was the worst kind of shame.” At times, Heywood chooses to move beyond personal experiences in her poems to address public situations with similar issues, as she does in “One of Us,” a piece concerning the well-known news story about s female kicker’s problems with the University of Colorado football program. A lengthy epigraph containing an excerpt from one CNN report of the circumstances precedes the poem, although such work usually lacks the impact of The Proving Grounds’ more intimate poetry.

In fact, a group of personal poems near the close of the volume that relate the speaker’s loss of a two-week-old infant son are among the most compelling in the collection. Heywood starts “Ethics” offering plainspoken lines filled with intensity: “I am waiting for him to wake up, / I am waiting for him to die.” She confides that she “never wanted children really,” didn’t want “motherhood”; however, later in the poem, as the persona recognizes the baby’s dire physical condition, the speaker concludes with an emotionally painful resolution: “His weight, his still face, / His open eyes on mine, I knew— / Knew for the first time that I wanted him / And knew I wanted him to die.”

Appropriately, Heywood follows these poems with a few final poems that reflect her eventually, and perhaps at first reluctantly, assuming a mother’s role. In “Caelan at One” the poet confesses a tendency to be absent from her young daughter’s life: “Ever since my daughter was born / What I seem to do best is leave.” Readers even see a parallel to the pattern of poor parenting exhibited by the poet’s own father earlier in the book. Indeed, in “Ecology” the speaker acknowledges a similarity: “My mother said / I was just like you.” At the same time, she confesses that as a girl she felt abandonment from her father: “you’d left us again, or really, I thought / You’d left me.” In the book’s last group of poems, Lesley Heywood looks back and also gazes forward. First, she mentions about her distanced relationship with her father: “Friends say I need to call you / Sometime before you die” (“Bringing in Wood”). Then, she re-examines the growing gap in her relationship with her daughter, ending the book with these final lines from “Caelan at Two”: “I promise you / In all the ways people do / I will try not to leave.”

In this manner, the collection—which began with a five-year-old daughter’s perceptions of her parents’ marriage collapsing and the consequences for her relationship with the father—comes to an end with a new beginning, as the girl has grown into her own motherhood, vowing not to repeat the mistakes her father made. Thus, Heywood’s book provides a hopeful sense of closure, though the word “try” in the volume’s final line appears realistically tentative, reflecting the speaker’s lingering anxiety and evident uncertainty.

Although The Proving Grounds, like almost all poets’ first books, is uneven at times—some stanzas slip in more prose-like lines one might find in a memoir, and a couple of poems are harmed by slightly awkward phrasing, “My lover was a better shot than me” (“Splitting Skeet”), or trivial inaccuracies, “The dialogue on Sex in the City” (“Calaen at One”)—this collection’s cumulative effect proves to be one of persuasion deriving from a powerful and convincing sequence of poems. As Leslie Heywood’s memoirist poetry in The Proving Grounds proceeds to disclose a somewhat confessional narrative, both unique and identifiable, following a deliberate arc from page to page, readers come to comprehend a conflicted woman who even as a young girl had sought in a number of ways to prove her worth to her father and others, but who gradually has begun to gain a greater sense of self-esteem, to understand how valuable she may be, especially as a mother to her own daughter.

Heywood, Leslie. The Proving Grounds. Red Hen Press, 2005.