Green
Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum: Polished
Carvings (Review of Michael Waters)
In "Driftwood," the last
poem in Michael Waters' latest collection, God is portrayed as an artist
working with wood. Using quick, Zen-like strokes he turns it into driftwood,
"the cacophonous score of the creation / captured in grooves and gnarls,"
then "tossed along the littoral." Of the " stalk-eyed critics
ragging this tidal / gallery," God says, " Philistines...why
do I bother?" But "He knows the artist has no choice / but
to bumble forward...."
The poem is a perfect way to end Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum
(BOA Editions, 1997; hereafter referred to as Green Ash) because
it captures the essence of the collection and repeats some of its important
themes; " Driftwood" is the coda to a "cacophonous"
symphony. Like the music of Charles Ives or Miles Davis, this collection
is erudite and rewarding, but it can be somewhat difficult at times. The
reader must bring a probing intelligence to the book in order to reap its
full rewards; Waters is not-- and never has been--writing for the lowest
common denominator.
According to his introductory remarks at an April 1997 reading at Salisbury
State University, where he teaches, some of his goals for the poetry in
the book were to write longer poems with longer lines and to include more
sensuality and humor. These aims he has accomplished, but on rare occasions
there are abstractions that can limit accessibility. For example, note these
lines from "Rain: Lake Forgotten":
One voice, somnolent, dazes from speakers slung across shoulders leaning toward the lake on the bridle path from the barn. When the rain fails to invisibility, the song will drone the distances, tunneling the ids * of lovers hauling themselves up now onto a muck-slick verge where they will kneel....
However, in general the collection is powerful
and enriching, as readers have come to expect from Waters, a dedicated craftsman
who deserves such praise as this statement by Floyd Collins in The Gettysburg
Review: "I cannot call to mind anyone of Waters' generation who
is currently writing better poetry."
Green Ash addresses such major themes as religion, sensuality, nature,
love, and loss in deft, graceful, and memorable ways. Waters' work compares
favorably to that of others who have similarly addressed these themes: James
Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Walt Whitman, to name a few. The Joycean idea
of the artist as God is presented seriously in "Driftwood" but
more casually and humorously in "God at Forty": "He never
answers prayers, but / heeds His morning routine: NPR, knee-bends, java,
/ then work, always the work...."
For Waters, traditional religion seems to have been replaced by a conscious
immersion into passion and an existential attention to nature. Sensuality
pulses throughout Green Ash and is much more blatant than in his
earlier work. However, the occasional use of profanity is not always an
advantage to the aesthetic force of the poetry; sometimes "fuck"
stands out like a bull among china. Such are the risks Waters knowingly
takes, though, usually negotiating them with impressive agility, and any
failings in this area are far outweighed by his successes elsewhere, notably
in his poems that include descriptions of landscapes, trees, and flowers.
As Collins has observed, Waters "is an empiricist, a narrow observer
of the corporeal world." I do not believe that any poet writing today
can surpass him in the accurate observation of nature and the evocative
use of natural imagery, as seen, for example, in "First Lesson: Winter
Trees":
These winter trees charcoaled against bare sky, ..................................................... like...like hair swept over a sleeping lover's mouth. I almost thought too fast. Soon enough these patient alders will begin to blossom in their wild unremembering to inhabit the jade, celebratory personae of late summer.
The title poem is not so much about trees
but about the memory of trees and the names of trees, which a scorned husband
repeats to himself like a mantra:
So as I lay there, the roof bursting with invisible branches, the darkness doubling in their shade, the accusations turning truths in the not-loving, green ash, red maple, black gum, I prayed....
There is a lot of pain in the book. In
the poem "Parthenopi" the speaker notes that "the common
measure of love is loss." As Waters said at the reading, "You
might think that many of these poems are about one long, painful relationship.
Actually they're about several long, painful relationships." The line
got a laugh, but there is obviously truth to it, as was also evident in
his previous book, Bountiful (Carnegie Mellon, 1992), in which he
indicates that one way to deal with lost love is to attend closely to nature,
to become deeply aware and appreciative of the bounty offered by life itself.
In Green Ash there are many examples of such reverence, and some
of them are linked directly to soothing the pain of loss. "Not Love"
presents a man caring for a plant given to him by a former lover; he wants
to "clip one cold blossom" of the cereus and "press it between
/ ragged leaves of the 1892 'Death-Bed' edition" (of Leaves of Grass):
I began to perfect these small, sacramental gestures so that whatever tendril flourished between us might still thrive, and her gift, however fragile, transmuted from the physical world to the rough language of the text, might, after death, survive.
There is only a little rough language in
Green Ash, and the book will survive, along with Waters' other work,
because very few of the poems are rough-edged and none are haphazard, even
though many resemble driftwood in their unexpected transitions and twisting
form as they snake down the pages. These poems have been crafted and polished
by a poet who is as good a writer as he is a perceiver. His talent is sometimes
shocking.
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MICHAEL WATERS NOT LOVE* Summer dusks, sunglare planing the back door, off-white paint curling into flakes, fine ash, the wood weather- worn and almost hieroglyphic, I lift the potted plant, night-blooming cereus flown east by a lover now distant, and prop it on the warm stone steps so the sheaths might ease upward and each leaf bathe in deepening glow. And grow. I tilt water brimming the lip of a coffee can onto loose, black soil, then spoon what pools from the saucer. Such tender- ness for these green yearnings, slips whose only desire seems to be to awaken into final simplicity. Urge and urge and urge, yawped Whitman. I want to awaken when the cereus flowers to clip one cold blossom before it fails and press it between ragged leaves of the 1892 "Death-Bed" edition for that woman I couldn't love long enough, and for whom, not loving, I began to perfect these small, sacramental gestures so that whatever tendril flourished between us might still thrive, and her gift, however fragile, transmuted from the physical world to the rough language of the text, might, after death, survive. RAIN: LAKE FORGOTTEN* Fairy-fall, the glaze of the peripheral burnishes the barley, the bees' cuneiform acrobatics in their collective flight home, wherever home may be, under what eave or rafter or in what box belonging to what keeper whose honey-borrowings, in exchange for cloister, nuture whatever future quivering antennae might foresee-- schemata of late spring unwinding * as lovers breaststroke lake-lip to lake-ledge, pausing to whisper among the floating pads or brush thighs in the constant winnowing of water to stay afloat, to drift together. The rain barely touches the lake's skin. One voice, somnolent, dazes from speakers slung across shoulders leaning toward the lake on the bridle path from the barn. When the rain fails to invisibility, the song will drone the distances, tunneling the ids * of lovers hauling themselves up now onto a muck-slick verge where they will kneel to shimmy down each other's suits and tongue the viscous sugars iced there...while the schemata of late spring require helpless, unself-conscious burrowings toward such a future as we might make in the light falling through rain failing on the milky swans'- wings of shattered water * as each sex-sopped lover lunges cleanly into the lake.
*From Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum. New York: BOA Editions Limited, ©1997 by Michael Waters.