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![Love song to the high desert
A Contrary review by Shaindel Beers
Departing by a Broken Gate
David Axelrod
Canongate
2010
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In 2007 I attended a workshop given by David Axelrod called “A Congress of Unruly Voices,” the premise of which was this—as poets, if we are to write about nature, we can’t simply describe nature; we must explore our human relationship with it. We have to become “A Congress of Unruly Voices” with nature rather than become Emerson’s “transparent eyeball.” Axelrod proves himself a master of this domain in Departing by a Broken Gate, his nearly flawless fifth collection of poems.
In his latest book, Axelrod explores the landscape, flora, and fauna of Eastern Oregon with a poet-philosopher’s eye. Sometimes the beauty of these poems lies in the litanous passages of bird and plant names sown throughout his lines. For instance, in “The Morning Chorus”:
…thorny fencerows
erupting, loud with multitudes of
thrushes and orioles, tanagers, towhees,
mockingbirds and jays, more than
you learned the names of, the pleasure
a vast wave of songs, not Babel
after the confusion of human tongues,
but a boundless accord passing from
one thicket to the next, calling earth
awake …
And in “After”:
Eagles brooded in barren snags, swans flared and displayed, rafts of teals, pintails, mallards, and mergansers drifted over flooded fields, ten thousand as loud as wind that carried them north the night before.
In addition to this abundance of image and sound, Axelrod explores man’s unease in the natural world—our inevitable effect on nature and its effect on us. In “Honey,” Axelrod begins:
Pioneers planted this grove
Of wide-crowned silver maples
Where wagon ruts descend
to the river from a treeless plateau
The speaker of the poem becomes more real to the reader as he consciously talks of himself, “L[ying] in deep spring grass / after a day spent wasting [his] life.” When readers discover that the wasted time of his life is time spent trying to impress other people or pretending to be impressed by them, the dichotomy of the poem becomes clear. Man’s effect on nature as well as our longing to return to nature are the embattled forces in the end of this poem, and in much of the book:
where a pruner’s saw lopped off
a broken limb: a swarm of bees,
wings golden in the April sun,
single-mindedly attending to
their Queen, for whom they dance
and sacrifice their brief lives
in a world always parallel to ours,
where we aren’t welcome anymore
and visit now only as thieves.
The previously mentioned poems and “On Finding My Friend Drunk at Lost Lake” are prime examples of Axelrod’s best nature writing.
Only once or twice in this nearly flawless collection does Axelrod overstep his bounds and become self-righteous and indignant. The worst offense of this sort takes place in the poem, “Owning Nothing at All.” The poem starts off in the right direction, with the speaker admiring nature, even if he is annoyed by man’s encroaching on it:
I can almost dismiss access roads
branching like vivisected veins
across bunchgrass hills, yellow
with patches of balsamroot and couse.
Axelrod’s use of specific plant names is reminiscent of portions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows.” But just as suddenly as we are soothed by the Latinate genus and species names, the tone shifts, becoming too judgmental, too fast:
So if that’s you up there, watching
from your glass observatory, I hope
my envy burns an x-ray of sunshine
up your fat arse. Because I’m down here
not entirely against my will . . .
This tone might fit in a protest poem with harsher language throughout, but it’s out of place in this poem and in this volume. Even so, one can forgive Axelrod these few lapses in tone. He has composed a volume which is a love song to Oregon’s high desert, and like any lover, he sometimes strikes out too brashly in defense of the beloved.
Shaindel Beers is poetry editor of Contrary.
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© 2010 | all rights reserved
about us | xml feed | Contrary ® is a registered trademark of Contrary Magazine | donate $1 | contact us