{"id":5982,"date":"2020-12-23T09:00:46","date_gmt":"2020-12-23T09:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=5982"},"modified":"2020-12-23T09:00:46","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T09:00:46","slug":"dont-muddy-the-waters-do-rock-the-boat","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/dont-muddy-the-waters-do-rock-the-boat\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Muddy the Waters, Do Rock the Boat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everything That Rises<\/em> by Joseph Stroud<\/strong><\/p>\n

Copper Canyon Press, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paperback. 159 pages. $14.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Everything<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Stroud is remarkable, having both lyric and prose gifts, a reverence for nature, and a willingness to face up to hard truths. His craft allows him to write necessary poems with immediacy, yet maintain a certain distance in a plain, powerful voice. W. S. Merwin said, \u201cThe authority of Joseph Stroud\u2019s poetry is startling . . . it is the recurring revelations that poetry brings to us, the crystal of our ordinary days. Stroud\u2019s poetry comes from the clear source.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Everything That Rises<\/em> is an ambitious collection with seven sections, including masterful translations of Tu Fu, Catullus, Neruda, and others. Stroud moves back and forth between lyricism and his more classical distance with ease.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Perfection of Craft,\u201d Stroud gives us a sample of what he does best. The speaker takes us on the hunt with a great blue heron who \u201cstalks among the reeds,\u201d halting to snare his meal. The bird \u201cstabs its beak, flings, into the air a roiling snake, and catches it \/ tosses it again, . . . \/ still alive, slithering down the heron\u2019s throat.\u201d He treats his meal as if it\u2019s a game. While the imagery stands out, this poem is really about craft. Is the poet like the heron, and the poem is the snake? The ideas and point of view are complex, the images vivid\u2014a signature Stroud six-liner.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

His previous book, Of This World: New a<\/em>nd Selected Poems<\/em>, contained many brilliant poems like this one in the book\u2019s opening section, “Suite For The Common.\u201d And again, in this new collection, with \u201cThe Tarantula,\u201d he takes us to a place \u201cbelow Solomon Ridge,\u201d where this arachnid \u201cthe size of my hand\u201d rears up, \u201cfeels the air with its front legs \/ its body covered in silky hair.\u201d The speaker kneels down, and it follows the shadow of his hand, \u201ca little dance before pouncing on the twig I hold before it.\u201d The Theraphosidae<\/em>\u00a0is curious, intelligent; then \u201cits fangs click open,\u201d and the speaker stands, takes a step back.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It watches, unmoving,<\/p>\n

waiting inside its own arachnid time,<\/p>\n

before continuing on,<\/p>\n

touching the ground delicately<\/p>\n

with each tip of its eight legs,<\/p>\n

heading out into the Mojave,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A powerful nature poem, like D.H Lawrence\u2019s snake poem, this tarantula, \u201cwalking like a hand,\u201d seems like one of the lords of life, \u201cdisappearing into a world where we cannot go.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mortality is the undertone and undertow in this book. At the end of Stroud\u2019s first section, we get \u201cRemember This<\/em>, Sappho Said,\u201d where a nameless shade from the underworld tells the speaker, \u201cremember that \/ among the living you were once offered love\u2014 \/ you, with your great pride and haughty disdain, \/ remember, love was once offered, and you refrained,\u201d setting the tone for the scenes of death that follow.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cHeart Attack in An Oregon Forest,\u201d an anonymous \u201cyou\u201d directs a sheriff by cell phone to a remote river where the speaker waits, hearing this stranger on the phone, \u201chis voice calling your name, \/ asking directions from the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cHomage to the Water Ouzel,\u201d Stroud begins, \u201cTimes you get so down into pain . . .\u201d but then the speaker thinks of the water ouzel, \u201cinto \/ this aching cold water the little bird plunges \/ and walks the bottom just trying to stay alive. Imagine that. Jesus Christ.<\/em> Try to imagine that.\u201d What\u2019s striking is the speaker\u2019s detachment at first, and then the immediacy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This dark undertone continues in the next section of the book. In \u201cThe End of Romanticism,\u201d Stroud gives us a college teacher\u2019s talk to his students at the end of a course on Romanticism. In this powerful prose poem, the teacher talks about Charles Lamb, whom they have not studied, who took care of his mentally ill sister after she had to be confined in Bedlam, \u201ca hospital worse than prison,\u201d for stabbing their mother to death. Later released into Lamb\u2019s care, she and Lamb wrote Tales from<\/em> Shakespeare<\/em>. When her illness recurred\u2014and they had learned the signs\u2014 \u201cthey knew she had no defense.\u201d \u201cAll semester,\u201d says the speaker, \u201cwe\u2019ve been discussing Romanticism, The Sublime, the articulation of Personal Emotion, and the power of Imagination.\u00a0 Now imagine this. Holding each other, carrying the restraining straps with them, Mary and Lamb, sobbing, walked the long road back to Bedlam.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Bridge of Change,\u201d the suicide of Stroud\u2019s teacher and mentor, John Logan, is the subject. We see Logan at the No Name Bar in Sausalito in the 1960s, drinking and holding forth about a boy who witnessed his mother\u2019s death\u2014jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge\u2014as he and his father watched, helpless. Logan offers insight by telling his own theory of poetry,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the poem as a bridge<\/p>\n

connecting me to you, <\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

you to me, <\/em>poetry
\nin whose healing music we might trace<\/p>\n

how to forgive, how to cross over,<\/p>\n

making our long difficult way<\/p>\n

into grace.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stroud renders the death of his own parents with restraint in \u201cCampfire.\u201d The speaker remembers a night with his father in the Tehachapis, \u201cHow ghostlike his image \/ appears to me now, how he seems almost a stranger, \/ and the boy sitting next to him, staring \/ into the flame, unable to make anything of it, \/ what do I make of him, \/ what would I tell him that he should know, \/ comforted as he is by the warmth of the fire \/ and the presence of his father sitting next to him \/ within the deep fatherless night surrounding him.\u201d The speaker\u2019s distance makes this moment universal.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A lot can be learned from Stroud regarding craft. He builds vivid imagery, much like with the blue heron, in “Imagining (Poetry).\u201d Young Stroud and his twin brother hook up a walkie-talkie with tin cans and tell each other secrets, intimate words connected by a string, \u201chearing at each end only what we might imagine.\u201d And in \u201cOppen \/ Praxis\u201d Stroud instructs, \u201cSay what happened in a way that makes it happen again . . . \u00a0Clarity and accuracy honor the reader. \/ Don\u2019t muddy the waters. Do rock the boat.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stroud has traveled the world searching for poems, novelty\u2014and possibly grace. He\u2019s looked in dangerous places\u2014 \u201csomewhere out past Swat, near the Korkorams, no road into it, Westerners forbidden. It was important to me that it be secluded, that to get to it I would have to leave my whole life behind.\u00a0 What was<\/em> it I so yearned to find?\u201d In the section, \u201cConvergence,\u201d we get a persona poem of a young Incan girl chosen to be sacrificed to the god. In his notes, Stroud says he was haunted by this image for years. He continues this section with omens and religious touchstones, as if the poet is \u201cshoring fragments against his ruins.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Everything That Rises <\/em>has no simple arc from grief to redemption. The deaths of family, friends, the coming extinctions in nature, his own mortality, his pain due to the nature of this violent world are all real, but he asks, \u201cWho was it that said \/ in some long-ago poem \/ this <\/em>world is all we have \/ of Paradise?\u201d Stroud\u2019s instinct is praise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Winner of many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lamont Foundation, Stroud gives us poems of nature\u2019s abundance with craft folded around absence. In \u201cMy Diamond Sutra,\u201d Stroud mentions \u201cdragon boats of poems, set on fire, pushed into the stream.\u201d In this way, he balances light and dark, showing one man\u2019s search for transcendence. His work deserves a wider audience\u2014not only poetry readers. Stroud\u2019s poems do rock the boat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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