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Night Watch on the Chesapeake
Poems deal with nature, children, love, parents, aging, dreams, death, war, travel, marriage, divorce, and the past
- GenresPoetry
81 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1987
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August 18, 2025
Night-time in a boat on Chesapeake Bay can be magical, and poet Peter Meinke conveys that magical quality well in a couple of the poems from his 1987 collection Night Watch on the Chesapeake. Yet one should not expect, from the book’s title, that all of the poems therein will deal with Chesapeake life. Rather, what one gets in Night Watch on the Chesapeake is a varied and engaging set of looks at all sorts of aspects of late-20th-century life.
Meinke, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in the northern New Jersey suburbs, was for many years a professor at Florida’s Eckerd College, where he also directed the college’s Writing Workshop. And from the variety of topics treated in Night Watch on the Chesapeake, I surmise that he has a wide variety of concerns and interests, as a good poet should.
I turned to Night Watch on the Chesapeake, when I found it in a now-closed bookstore in downtown Manassas, Virginia, because its title (and its placement in the bookstore’s Regional Interest aisle) caused me to surmise that the collection might have a great deal to do with the Chesapeake region, a core interest of mine. And those poems that do treat of Chesapeake life capture the nuances and textures of life in the region quite well. The title poem, for example, captures well what a mariner on the lower Patuxent River might experience on an evening cruise down toward where the river opens into Chesapeake Bay:
The North Star beams us cleanly down the Patuxent
into the waiting mouth of Chesapeake Bay,
past Sandgates on starboard, Sollers on port,
with a crescent moon rocking us toward day. (p. 3)
The speaker is a mariner, checking dials in an engine room and reporting results up to a pilot house. And as he “stare[s] hard through the darkness” after passing Point Patience, reminiscing about his brother “who went with me/to Our Lady Star of the Sea and loved/Sister Margaret and pulled the blueclaws up/with infinite gentleness on chicken necks tied to a string” (p. 3), he evokes the kind of memory that might easily come back to many people raised in that heavily Catholic part of Southern Maryland. Toward the poem’s conclusion, though, the reader gets the sense that, as surely and inexorably as the Patuxent flows into the Chesapeake, this poem is flowing in a direction much more complex and troubling that a simple reminiscence about childhood experiences attending church and going crabbing.
The part of Southern Maryland that Meinke recreates in such fine detail in “Night Watch on the Chesapeake” – a land of mariners, and crabbing, and Catholic schools and churches – is also home to a vast military installation, the Patuxent River Naval Air Station (“Pax River,” as it is known throughout the area by people on both sides of the gates). This dimension of Southern Maryland life is explored in the poem “A Church Cemetery in St. Mary’s.” In this poem, a runner finds himself moving “into shade and overgrowth where Indian/and pilgrim wrestled to a foregone conclusion/and the Susquehannocks and all their kin/were terminated with extreme prejudice,/as we have learned to say” (p. 5).
The speaker reflects on how strange it sounds to use the term “extreme prejudice” – 20th-century bureaucratic jargon used to describe government-sanctioned killings – when the term is being applied to the long-gone Indigenous people of what is now Maryland – “Today/all that is left are names – Piscataway,/Patuxent, Chaptico, Mattapany” (p. 5). Looking at the neat rows of graves in a Saint Mary’s County churchyard to which the runner’s path takes him, he then takes a turn from this peaceful place to a much more menacing site – a Cold War-era naval base, shut tightly against civilians, where who-knows-what sort of planning for a Third World War is taking place.
It becomes clear that the main character of the poem is himself a military man when the speaker of the poem states that “now,/his turn on watch, he turns around,/heading for the naval base, his/silent neighborhood of transients/where no one picks up hitchhikers…” (p. 6). Running past streets named for astronauts, the main character observes “the convex Testing Centers/marked ‘Off Limits,’ even for him, and wonders exactly what is tested/in these forbidden structures, so near/the old church graveyard in St. Mary’s” (p. 6).
Having grown up in Maryland during Cold War times, I can testify that there were many towns in my home state – from Aberdeen to Frederick to my hometown of Bethesda – where, walking or driving by the gates of a strongly fortified government installation, one might wonder exactly what preparations for World War III were taking place behind those gates. Meinke captures well the tensions of those times.
There’s not much else about the Chesapeake in Night Watch on the Chesapeake, though I did like the way in which the speaker of “The Pin” describes, “as we round Point-No-Point on Chesapeake Bay,/jets ticking the waves like suicidal gulls”, the feeling he gets “mourning for lost poets in the pilot house”, and adds that “I /move in spirit toward those sailing ships/across whose graceful bows the cold eye/of the radar goes blip blip blip, throwing/their temporary image on the screen” (p. 7).
Overall, I found Meinke’s poetry to be pleasant, well-crafted, and sometimes quite inventive. For instance, a number of these poems from 1987 – a year of considerable Cold War tension – have a striking focus on the nuclear-war anxieties of those times. Take “Atomic Pantoum,” for instance. A pantoum is a poem of four-line stanzas, with the second and fourth lines of each stanza serving as the first and third lines of the next stanza); and Meinke cleverly uses this poetic form to evoke the chain-reaction process through which a nuclear weapon releases its vast destructive power:
In a chain reaction
the neutrons released
split other nuclei
which release more neutrons
The neutrons released
blow open some others
which release more neutrons
and start this all over… (p. 15)
The poem proceeds with a devastating critique of the Cold War mentality that fostered the development of ever-more-powerful atomic weapons – an America where “we sing to Jesus” while, at the same time, “With plutonium trigger/curled and tightened/we are dying to use it/torching our enemies” (pp. 15-16).
I also liked the book’s final section, “Underneath the Lantern,” a multi-part poem that looks back at Meinke’s growing-up years in Brooklyn in a manner that conveys the textures of the past without drifting over into nostalgia.
Overall, I found Night Watch on the Chesapeake to be a well-crafted and thought-provoking collection of contemporary poetry. Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, as part of its Pitt Poetry Series, Night Watch on the Chesapeake is a good example of the kind of solid and thoughtful poetic work that the press characteristically publishes. I just would have liked to have seen more about the Chesapeake within its pages.
Meinke, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in the northern New Jersey suburbs, was for many years a professor at Florida’s Eckerd College, where he also directed the college’s Writing Workshop. And from the variety of topics treated in Night Watch on the Chesapeake, I surmise that he has a wide variety of concerns and interests, as a good poet should.
I turned to Night Watch on the Chesapeake, when I found it in a now-closed bookstore in downtown Manassas, Virginia, because its title (and its placement in the bookstore’s Regional Interest aisle) caused me to surmise that the collection might have a great deal to do with the Chesapeake region, a core interest of mine. And those poems that do treat of Chesapeake life capture the nuances and textures of life in the region quite well. The title poem, for example, captures well what a mariner on the lower Patuxent River might experience on an evening cruise down toward where the river opens into Chesapeake Bay:
The North Star beams us cleanly down the Patuxent
into the waiting mouth of Chesapeake Bay,
past Sandgates on starboard, Sollers on port,
with a crescent moon rocking us toward day. (p. 3)
The speaker is a mariner, checking dials in an engine room and reporting results up to a pilot house. And as he “stare[s] hard through the darkness” after passing Point Patience, reminiscing about his brother “who went with me/to Our Lady Star of the Sea and loved/Sister Margaret and pulled the blueclaws up/with infinite gentleness on chicken necks tied to a string” (p. 3), he evokes the kind of memory that might easily come back to many people raised in that heavily Catholic part of Southern Maryland. Toward the poem’s conclusion, though, the reader gets the sense that, as surely and inexorably as the Patuxent flows into the Chesapeake, this poem is flowing in a direction much more complex and troubling that a simple reminiscence about childhood experiences attending church and going crabbing.
The part of Southern Maryland that Meinke recreates in such fine detail in “Night Watch on the Chesapeake” – a land of mariners, and crabbing, and Catholic schools and churches – is also home to a vast military installation, the Patuxent River Naval Air Station (“Pax River,” as it is known throughout the area by people on both sides of the gates). This dimension of Southern Maryland life is explored in the poem “A Church Cemetery in St. Mary’s.” In this poem, a runner finds himself moving “into shade and overgrowth where Indian/and pilgrim wrestled to a foregone conclusion/and the Susquehannocks and all their kin/were terminated with extreme prejudice,/as we have learned to say” (p. 5).
The speaker reflects on how strange it sounds to use the term “extreme prejudice” – 20th-century bureaucratic jargon used to describe government-sanctioned killings – when the term is being applied to the long-gone Indigenous people of what is now Maryland – “Today/all that is left are names – Piscataway,/Patuxent, Chaptico, Mattapany” (p. 5). Looking at the neat rows of graves in a Saint Mary’s County churchyard to which the runner’s path takes him, he then takes a turn from this peaceful place to a much more menacing site – a Cold War-era naval base, shut tightly against civilians, where who-knows-what sort of planning for a Third World War is taking place.
It becomes clear that the main character of the poem is himself a military man when the speaker of the poem states that “now,/his turn on watch, he turns around,/heading for the naval base, his/silent neighborhood of transients/where no one picks up hitchhikers…” (p. 6). Running past streets named for astronauts, the main character observes “the convex Testing Centers/marked ‘Off Limits,’ even for him, and wonders exactly what is tested/in these forbidden structures, so near/the old church graveyard in St. Mary’s” (p. 6).
Having grown up in Maryland during Cold War times, I can testify that there were many towns in my home state – from Aberdeen to Frederick to my hometown of Bethesda – where, walking or driving by the gates of a strongly fortified government installation, one might wonder exactly what preparations for World War III were taking place behind those gates. Meinke captures well the tensions of those times.
There’s not much else about the Chesapeake in Night Watch on the Chesapeake, though I did like the way in which the speaker of “The Pin” describes, “as we round Point-No-Point on Chesapeake Bay,/jets ticking the waves like suicidal gulls”, the feeling he gets “mourning for lost poets in the pilot house”, and adds that “I /move in spirit toward those sailing ships/across whose graceful bows the cold eye/of the radar goes blip blip blip, throwing/their temporary image on the screen” (p. 7).
Overall, I found Meinke’s poetry to be pleasant, well-crafted, and sometimes quite inventive. For instance, a number of these poems from 1987 – a year of considerable Cold War tension – have a striking focus on the nuclear-war anxieties of those times. Take “Atomic Pantoum,” for instance. A pantoum is a poem of four-line stanzas, with the second and fourth lines of each stanza serving as the first and third lines of the next stanza); and Meinke cleverly uses this poetic form to evoke the chain-reaction process through which a nuclear weapon releases its vast destructive power:
In a chain reaction
the neutrons released
split other nuclei
which release more neutrons
The neutrons released
blow open some others
which release more neutrons
and start this all over… (p. 15)
The poem proceeds with a devastating critique of the Cold War mentality that fostered the development of ever-more-powerful atomic weapons – an America where “we sing to Jesus” while, at the same time, “With plutonium trigger/curled and tightened/we are dying to use it/torching our enemies” (pp. 15-16).
I also liked the book’s final section, “Underneath the Lantern,” a multi-part poem that looks back at Meinke’s growing-up years in Brooklyn in a manner that conveys the textures of the past without drifting over into nostalgia.
Overall, I found Night Watch on the Chesapeake to be a well-crafted and thought-provoking collection of contemporary poetry. Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, as part of its Pitt Poetry Series, Night Watch on the Chesapeake is a good example of the kind of solid and thoughtful poetic work that the press characteristically publishes. I just would have liked to have seen more about the Chesapeake within its pages.
February 13, 2018
At this point in my study of Meinke, I’ve read almost all of his published poetry and this is probably my favorite. I tabbed so many poems that it might have been easier to tab the ones I didn’t like.
My faves are: A Dream of Third Base, Atomic Pantoum, Aunt Mary, Blue Morning Glories, Caitlin Rampant on a Field in Tuscany, Fifty on Fifty, First Love, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand Von Helmholtz, Marathon Key, Prisoners, Sonnets for a Diabetic, The ABC of Aerobics, The Album, The Basketball Coach at Fifty, The Crystallographer in Love, The House, The Pin, Twenty Years Later, Uncle Sanford, Vision
My faves are: A Dream of Third Base, Atomic Pantoum, Aunt Mary, Blue Morning Glories, Caitlin Rampant on a Field in Tuscany, Fifty on Fifty, First Love, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand Von Helmholtz, Marathon Key, Prisoners, Sonnets for a Diabetic, The ABC of Aerobics, The Album, The Basketball Coach at Fifty, The Crystallographer in Love, The House, The Pin, Twenty Years Later, Uncle Sanford, Vision
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews