I met these two young poets recently at the University of Northern Iowa where they, along with others, presented a workshop on “place in poetry” as well as participated in a reading of contemporary New England poetry. Classmates in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire, both poets suggest the influence of Charles Simic; but happily their books are enthused with the original vision of each poet. Both poets rely on place to convey their vision. Much of the imagery is rural. The significance of water is dominant, and in the best sense of a rustic New England tradition, the speakers in each collection comment on frail humanity with a somber, sometimes wry, observation tinged with ghostly lyrics. It is my pleasure to commend their work to a new, perhaps, larger audience.
First Duncan D. Campbell’s collection, Farmstead, Fire, Field. Campbell’s poetry has received the Edward R. and Frances S. Collins Literary Prize in 2010, and the Dick Shea Memorial Award in 2012. This poet knows pain. He’s kind of a Satyr, a child of nature much wiser than he first appears, burned with the unforgettable pain of first experience. The voice in his work is not jaded, but it is not happy either. It is skeptical, but life is not a lost cause. Campbell’s book is a myth in the making. Its telling is worth hearing, like a good folk song, resounding in the voices of field hands who sing darkness all day long to keep evil an arm’s length away. Like so many survivors, the soot of experience has colored their souls, but they can’t stop singing.
There is a female presence in these pages too, and her mysterious presence confounds the speaker even as it confirms his resolve to solve the mystery. But the harder he tries, the more he realizes his own faulting ability, and such reflection governs so much of the emotion within these poems. Oh, the poor, honest singer in these lines – so true while being false, so faithful to his doubts.
The characters in Campbell’s pages appear like uninvited guests at a strange gathering where no one is sure how to proceed. They are quiet, non-heroes. The poems are full of cuts and bruises – bleeding and all manner of not-quite-right occasions. The speaker lurks in the shadows, and he is aware of his hiding. The poet puts the reader right there with him, close enough to smell the fear mangling the short-lived hope. The poems are ghostly lyrical. They haunt the speaker, the occasions are haunted. Readers are drawn close to this haunting. It is real, everything is real, and that is what makes it so haunting.
I love these poems. I like how they fit together, despite the rough edges. Farmstead, Fire, Field functions as a novella of harsh imaging. Nothing is quite smooth. The river is never bucolic, never settled, never completely trustworthy. Sunrise offers no easy promise. The landscape is witness to a downtrodden but persistent speaker hoping against hope. Consider this example in “The Burning Field”: “I was in-between fears. I dreamed / only of a woman who removed everything / before bathing in the river … Her laughter / was a fire burning … There are burns, blisters in memory / that no salve or measure of water can heal” (p. 26 lines 1-3 & 5-6 & 22-23). Another example, from “Night Crossing Bridges” begins with the uncertain tone: “Water from the pump, / cold and ghostlike / splashed against my face” (p. 22, lines 1-3), then moves to its frustrated ending: “The distance between us. / My reflection in the doorknob / reaches for my hand. / I am empty, / I am reckless with it” (p. 23, lines 1-4).
William Stratton’s title, Under the Water was Stone, comprises five sections: “Family,” “Friends Beloved,” “Self,” “The World,” and “Home.” Although each section contains gems, the first section is my favorite. Much of the “Family” section recalls a lost father, (in fact, the book is dedicated to his father) and the pain is vividly imagined. Never maudlin, a courageous longing dominates the whole book, but especially this first section.
Similar to Campbell’s work, there is a wonderful reliance on woods and stream to help situate the human conflicts. There seems to be a never-ending quest to hold on to what has passed. In the explicitly elegiac, “The Birds My Father Loved,” the speaker sees, “in that first year without him” (p. 14, line 9) what his father has known, and this newfound knowledge, though painful, suggests the establishment of carrying on a tradition: “knowing the mountain of him was / gone forever, sitting on the empty / branches and seeing at last the drifts / and how high they are, feeling / through puffed feathers for the first time / the cold” (lines 13 -18).
In “Closing My Eyes To The Light Of An Autumn Morning,” the poet offers a reflective to in his narrative, a tribute to the lost father: “Those mornings / I think about my father. He loved the early / hours, he used to tell me they were the best / part of the day” (p. 11, lines 4-7). In the second stanza of the poem, we witness the death of a grandfather, in addition to the memory of a father. In these autumnal reflections, the speaker struggles to believe: “they can be together now, if / you believe in that sort of thing. I do, I think” (18-19). In this context, the light “slants haphazardly” (16). But in a conclusion that reminds me of Frost’s cryptic, abrupt ending in his poem “Out, Out,” here the speaker has little time to ponder the existential phenomenon of light, or its symbolic overtures. A powerful, but passing glimpse in the morning warms the reflection, then the poem moves to its busy conclusion: “It was time / for chores. It was time to let go, the world / belonging only to itself, and he with it” (25-26). The morning light gives way to the looming darkness. In the meantime, chores keep us.
In “Rises” Stratton masterfully contrasts the rising of feeding trout (symbolic of rising emotion) with the sinking feeling that accompanies. The speaker sees “the shape of my father – / squinting against the low sun / and casting flies that flit and bobble” (p.5, lines 5-7). Here, even when (or maybe I should say, especially when) “no mouth rises / we are content / to watch the water / slide towards the sea / and let the light sink / slowly into evening” (10 -15).
These two books offer an inspiring combination of fresh voices singing with the timeless. Already expertly aware of their craft, both poets demonstrate remarkable control. In each collection, what is unsaid is as important as what is said. Each poet presents a variety of construction that satisfactorily frames the emotion of the poems, enabling their full power. Both writers are deeply affected by loss, both are moved by friendship, and both struggle to find their rightful place within the mysterious natural world that precedes them. More than mere nature writing, nonetheless, both poets honor the raw earth, with all its glory and disguise, keeping survivors on their toes, and good poets writing, hopefully, for a long time to come. In reading these two I find an increasing awareness of patient intensity. The beauty is in the longing. I keep rereading these guys. You will too.
Reviewed by Ken Hada, Ada, Oklahoma
Farmstead, Fire, Field. By Duncan D. Campbell. Washingtonville, NY: ELJ Publications, 2015. ISBN: 9781941617281
Under the Water was Stone: Poetry by William Stratton. Sacramento: Winter Goose Publishing. 2014. ISBN: 9781941058145