Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501240017
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY DAN GRIBBIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Besides the characteristic somber tone and exquisite imagery, one of the first things a reader may notice about Eric Trethewey's third volume of poetry, "The Long Road Home," is how seriously he takes the poet's responsibility of naming things.
In this volume (published in Trethewey's native Canada), the final poem in the first of five sections is entitled "Leaving Suva, 1967." In the harbor at Suva, Fiji, we encounter "a lugger limping home to this inlet of the dispossessed." On the jetty, "craggy-featured Fiji Islanders ... stand in groups and perch on bollards, waiting, impassive." Luggers? Bollards? This is poetry rooted in the everyday, the blab of the pave, to quote Walt Whitman, a poetry sunk deep in firm linguistic soil.
Now a teacher at Hollins College and one of the singular poetic voices of his generation, Trethewey has grounded his work in labor. Labor with his hands. This volume, like its predecessor "Evening Knowledge," is steeped in the bone-weary grind of blue-collar toil. In "Evening Shift," a van to be loaded with goods is "ass-ended up to the dock," tended by men whose lives are measured in freight. The poet, strangely itinerant, both in the work and out of it, gauges the life in passing:
"Past midnight, ten, twenty
years deep in it, they yank
at time boxed up into hours,
heaved onto rollers and stacked
in the holds of eighteen-wheelers
to be hauled away to places
they've never been to,
will never go."
The subject is work and its toll on lives. The subject is loss, as well.
Never has Trethewey revealed his sense of what life takes so completely as in "Waking at the Mount Olive Baptist Church," a poem dedicated to his late first wife. The grief is his and his daughter's, a loss confronted directly and honestly, with all the questions intact.
"What can we bring ourselves to pray for on this day?" the speaker asks. The poem itself, he feels, is "something more/ than the nothing we can give you at last/ that needs to be held up in words."
Trethewey's emotion is customarily muted, reaching us through the controlled medium of hard-won experience, painstakingly pondered, communicated with understated grace. In "The Cellar," what may be the most powerful poem in a powerful book, we get a chillingly dramatic evocation of the finality of human loss set against the trick of hope that memory plays.
Here, in his panicky rush to answer his dead wife's cry, the speaker runs down "the steep, narrow stairs,/ feeling my way back in the dark,/ calling out with each uncertain step,/ Wait, please wait, I'm on my way."
The poetry of Eric Trethewey is philosophical in tone, a dogged search for what he calls in one poem here "a bearable notion of things."
Returning to his home country there in the maritime provinces, the speaker faces the ironies of time. The landscape he remembers - in many places bleached, gutted, and razed, ever stark and restrained - offers remembrance of pain, but also a stoic comfort.
The people are gone, now. Only the barest outlines remain of houses and barns he knew. It is the natural creatures, at home in their element, that may allow the sense of continuity he seeks.
"Loons in the distance will laugh at the light
while trout rise like crooked fingers in air -
beckoning flashes to call someone back
to springtime, to himself in the dawn."
Gifted in his sensitivity to the painful truths of a life lived hard in hard places, Trethewey endows each poem in "The Long Road Home" with a genuine astonishment before that most profound of all questions confronting humankind: Why can we not be assured, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is meaning in this pain?
Dan Gribbin teaches at Ferrum College.
by CNB