Review by
Stephen Thomas in The
Ghost
Trees:
by Klyd Watkins
Out
of the blue this chapbook came to me. I had never heard of Klyd Watkins nor
visited the landscape out of which his poem emerges. Nothing about the
appearance of the book promised anything. No blurbs. No prestigious imprint.
Not even a particularly interesting design..
Nevertheless, because it was sent to me, I opened it and began to read.
What a terrific poem! Watkins comes
straight into his subject matter without any posturing or poeticizing. He’s
made something in the spirit of Ammons, a long meditation on nature and the
practice of poetry, loosely organized around a walk through a forest. The
poet’s habitually curious and shapely mind opens to the forces of the terrain,
especially to the trees and to the other walkers, who like the speaker stand
for the moment outside the world of work. Subject matter here is a series of
encounters in what I take to be a nature preserve in the vicinity of a city.
The first of these, with a the shattered trunk of a lightning struck white oak,
brings in the poet’s fear and fascination with what becomes of trees in death,
and by extension, of himself.
like the other day the lady with the tripod and large
telescope asked me
are you a
birder too? No I’m tree people I said.
And what it means to be of the tree people
occupies the remainder of the poem. As it turns out this birder ends up backing
away from the speaker as he allows his enthusiasm to overcome his sober, good
sense.
Even
when they become paneling or something
their ghost stays with the substance
breaks into pieces…
and, out in the woods, a fallen log,
the spirit stays there
bartering grace for place to track
time.
This
is not the poetry of quips and apercus. It a poem of momentum
and of risk. It regards self-revelation with delicacy and respect and a
certain healthy doubt, which expresses itself most fully in the poet’s
encounters with his muse. This figure, wearing a "copper brassiere"
and holding a library book seems to be a Valkyrie, but she speaks with the
wisdom of Simone Weil. She has no patience for the poet’s high-blown opinion of
his own struggles. For her the poet’s clear duty is simply to make poems
without inflating their worth or his own, even ironically, with such prayers as
"burn me lord burn me I’m still full of shit."
Besides his desire to make much of
himself (a desire that this reviewer can ruefully confess) the poet’s main
conflict is with work. It seems he’s taking a break from his living, which is
real estate, to return to the trails above
Watkins has a wonderful descriptive gift and a capacity for capturing the drama
of projection. As he looks at a storm torn hillside, he sees his desire to make
sense in light of its forms and pressure.
We were watching the lake’s mighty leaping roll in the storm’s
direction northeast in opposition
to the southeastern tide bright backed little
moon tugged waves
no more than an 8th the size
of the storm wave nevertheless rolling on in their
destined direction push into the wind waves as if they were a
bus
the tide waves
reach for a handhold to get onto.
The complex syntax of speech here remind me again of Ammons. The sentences, even when they
appear to lose themselves in subordinate clauses and qualifications
, find their way back to their streambeds and convince me of the poet’s
sure sense of direction.
As the poem climbs to its highest
pitch in witnessing this storm, the poet’s commitment to the syntax and rhythm
of ordinary, complex American speech finds its way to prayer, the well-spring
of the American poetic medium. As Pound says somewhere, "Nothing that
could not under the stress of some emotion be
spoken." Or words to that effect. Of course,
prayer is one context in which we lay ourselves open to the most powerful
stresses and express them in the most consciously complex improvisations. The
issues here are the land and ourselves in the land.
What is to become of it as the cities engulf it and us with their fiscal fictions. This poet turns to prayer and to celebration. Read
his work in this and the previous issue of the
-Stephen Thomas in The
