Affectionate Responsibilities

The title poem of Timothy Steele’s new collection of verse suggests that as the poet moves into later middle age he sees a deepening symbolic correspondence between the coursings of sun and stars and his own journey through life. The winter solstice, around December 21, is the shortest day of the year but is also a day that leads to a time of increasing light and to Christmas day as well. Closing the first of two sections into which these thirty-five poems are gathered, and poised in the exact center of the book like the sun at its winter solstice in the tropic of Capricorn, “Toward the Winter Solstice” ends with speculation about the Star of Bethlehem. These lines display Steele’s characteristic and winning combination of the modern and the traditional: “Some wonder if the Star of Bethlehem / Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed; / It’s comforting to look up from this roof / And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost, / To recollect that in antiquity / The winter solstice fell in Capricorn / And that, in the Orion Nebula, / From swirling gas, new stars are being born.” Matching that poem is “Starr Farm Beach,” the final poem of the book’s second section and of the book itself. There the poet tells us that in his youth he took the name of a dairy farm (Starr) to mean a farm that grew stars for “ghost gleaners” to bring up into the heavens. This linking of earth and heaven by way of stars prepares us for the poem’s closing lines that hint at a recovery, in contemporary terms, of the old picture of the cosmos as replete with beauty, order, and purpose: “we best loved stars rising here and there, / Whether from hopes of something we might sow / Or from a lonely impulse to declare / The kinship of the lofty and the low.”

The words “We liked to think” near the beginning of “Starr Farm Beach” and the phrase “fanciful analogies” in “Daybreak, Benedict Canyon”—in which the poet sees a canyon filled with fog as a second worldwide flood and himself as Noah—are clues to one of Steele’s primary methods. In poem after poem Steele presents exact and objective yet lovingly empathetic descriptions of things—yellow birches, mallards, an herb garden, a dead opossum, a city fountain—combined with imaginative speculations, gentle regrets, and what one might call morally directed wishful thinking about how things are, how they might be made better, and how, if at all, such betterment might be achieved. In “Anima,” for example, Steele ponders the natural human tendency to treat objects as something like people: worry over whether a thief is treating a stolen bike properly or whether a car seems to speak when a passerby writes Wash me on its windshield. Is such fancifulness simply foolish? Not for Steele, who writes, “It is, then, well that we retain a sense / That objects feel and suffer as we do: / It checks our carelessness and negligence. / It makes us see familiar things anew.” This sense is enhanced by adopting an attitude of “alert passivity” toward the ever-fickle Muse, who, in her own good time, will respond to the poet’s courtship and devotion by yielding “Art’s rich and magical suggestiveness” in “the deeper language she imparts” (“A Muse”). Such an enticing poetics is captured in a Renaissance-like eternizing poem about a lonely spinster, long dead, whom only the poet now memorializes: “I feel a certain / Affectionate responsibility / Since, having been among the very youngest / Of her acquaintances, I may one day / Be the last person who remembers her” (“Ethel Taylor”).

Steele’s affectionate responsibilities are wide ranging, but in some poems his natural inclination toward the civil, the gentle, and the humane is sorely tested. One of the book’s most powerful poems, “April 27, 1937,” is about saturation bombing in Spain, England, and Germany; the discovery and use of atomic power against Japan; and the ever-present [End Page...