The ebb and flow of ‘Narrow Cradle’
Wade Kearley’s month-by-month poems explore natural, global and internal worlds
NARROW CRADLE BY WADE KEARLEY BREAKWATER BOOKS $19.95 108 PAGES
The poems in Wade Kearley’s new volume are divided into 12 sections, organized by calendar months, December to November, all sub-headed “on Lawlor’s Brook.”
They are largely narrative, even in a sense narrated: “I watch the / same street from the same café where … I last saw you, my daughter”; “I used to wish you could fly, / soar over the many who never looked in your eyes.”
The formats shift, from calibrated line breaks, to the introduction of textual beats (or breaths), to the inclusion of back-and-forth dialogues, to the organization of word and line into shapes that take flight from a perch (as in“– American goldfinch” where “the bird, stunned by the falling, / plays dead for the giant who crouches / and exhales a cloud of pity”) or surface through the ocean (like the squid in “il cauto” who “jets away from her squad / her three hearts all pumping copper blood, / then she darts through my breath as it worries upward”). Some are set into three- or fourline stanzas, while others play across single lines and/ or paragraphs; “–starlings” is near haiku-weight at just 15 words long.
There’s also some musical composition, in “–amy chains”, with melody from Tamsyn Russell.
Consumed in batches, they exude a diary/journal kind of flavour, nicely in keeping with the chronological unfolding. It’s a year in the mid-life of a poet both dodging and confronting basic significant human issues; the shade of mortality, the joys and fears that bloom and trail from children and grandchildren.
Kearley is concerned with a trio of spheres, or worlds: the natural (through observing the flora and creatures around him); the global (through travel — besides his poetry Kearley has published two travel books, inspired by his 900-kilometre walk following Newfoundland’s abandoned railway); and the internal (arenas that are often turbulent to the point of psychiatric intervention).
The first few poems are a little pedestrian — though one is set during an air mishap over the Himalayas — but as we read on, they accumulate pitch and punch like a rolling snowball. For example, the counter-puncture of “–shem meditates / on his disease” (according to the Old Testament, Shem was one of the sons of Noah, and his lineage led to Abraham): “There is nobody in the water. // I listen to their splashing. / No one sings to me anymore. // And the songs rend my heart. / I know we are close because we never touch. // All this is / true, because it never happened …”
Many pieces reference or are dedicated to friends, and the delightful “–inbetween” is a “found poem” from an acquaintance’s email: “Xmas come and gone, / New Year’s Eve next. / No plans for me. / Stone Jug restaurant is having a do, / but expensive, and I don’t know people going. // All good so far. No resolutions, per se …” Others are addressed to “you,” sometimes further distinguished as a family member, sometimes not, as in “–the divorce of aurora borealis”; “At dawn a herd of caribou stampedes / across the tattooed slope of your left thigh / as you kick me from under the woolen blanker. // You yawn and gather the folds. / With your arm newly etched in fire, / you banish me. You remind me how / last night I failed you when I refused / to dance beneath the North Star.”
The title is from “May on Lawlor’s Brook”: “We who inherit this narrow cradle herd / Our own broods along the gravel and fret / That time has not yet revealed the threat / That might steal them from us without a word.”
There’s the domestic lull of “–tea & bread rising” “I // Sugar and yeast, water and flour. Salt / spilled on the counter. After a night / of baking, the stove / purrs quiet with birch embers. // I linger in the dawn and break the first crust, / drain the pot. There is time / before I must leave. I lift the sash and whistle / for the finch in the gooseberry bush.”
Contrast that with “–full moon over wreck cove”: “I crouch among the thick alders, halfway up the hill and, / protected from the north winds, / watch broken surf asit scrambles over itself / in the gut, tears away at the seams. / I button my swileskin and wonder, / Am I unravelling too? / Why do I deserve this dream?”
Moods range, spirits shift, as images ebb and flow on the pages.
It’s a year in the mid-life of a poet both dodging and confronting basic significant human issues
Joan Sullivan is editor of Newfoundland Quarterly magazine. She reviews both fiction and non-fiction for The Telegram.