Jim Murdoch

[A] lull. A hiatus. Breathing space.

[C]larity isn’t accessibility. (I’m not sure what accessibility means, because what’s accessible to one reader may not be accessible to another. So, when we talk about accessibility, we’re getting into statistics: what percentage of readers understand this poem on first reading? On second? On third? Etc. It’s a useless term.)

I am essentially a wandering writer, a writer without a map. Each poem comes in its own way, and it’s not until I look back that I see how certain poems have worn a path in the long grass.

[W]hat a poet owes the reader isn’t fairness, or message-simplicity, but a form or structure that aligns with the poem’s intentions, as distinct from the poet’s intentions.

Not to understand is ok. … Just listen.

The book shows this most “naive” of poets taking on topics and problems we associate with “sentimental” writers; it is a book of elegies and backward glances, endings and deaths, memory and old age. […] Trained as a chemist, Ammons liked to consider nonhuman nature on every scale, from atoms to pebbles to mountains to galaxies; A Coast of Trees shows him thinking as well about people, about individual human beings’ legacies, about how we mourn, how we die, and how we go on. […] Every place in nature is a gravesite, each place on Earth includes some sort of loss—if not human death, then predation, decay, fire, flood.

the night rain—
another dream
I don't remember

In all the years of my writing life, I’ve responded to and aspired to a quality in poetry that I can only call “clarity.” Not that I’m interested in clarity at the expense of honest complexity.

                             Do you remember that girl
under the slanted cave roof, watching you? She
grew, loved, labored, and died watching you.
How many girls before
the decades of drought, the long diaspora?
                                 Cliff Swallow at Mesa Verde

Things come to me and I write them down. If I go three months without a line, I don’t fret because I know that at least I’m not adding to the store of dispensable poems by forcing the issue. Not that any of my poems are indispensable, however good they might seem to me. My practice, such as it is, feels authentic to me, and that’s about all I believe a poet can ask.

With a smile and a semi-salute Dr Alexander said to guard A: 'I'll be seeing you,' then backed and proceeded to energetically unravel the wheel. (bold mine)

This is not to say that the book is not full of wonderful lines – many of the sections (much shortened!) would, I’m sure, make excellent poems. Where there is an element of narrative, there is enough to suggest that Vesaas is, indeed, a novelist worth reading. The Boat in the Evening, however, is a wishy washy mishmash of prose and poetry, the prose thickening the beauty of the poetry, the poetry thinning the sense of the prose, until there is very little of anything appealing left on the page.