Getting to Gardisky Lake by Paul J. Willis (review)

In the opening poem of his new book, Paul Willis establishes his role as a sort of poetic umpire. The poet recalls a picnic he attended as a boy with his father's academic coworkers and their families. Too shy to join in the softball game after lunch, he watched as the department chair stepped behind the plate to act the part of umpire:

A burly graduate student smacks a long onepast center field. "Foul ball!'' cries the chair.Someone's fifth-grade daughter taps an awkwarddribble into the weeds. "Fair!'' he cries.

I hear the echoes even now,the guffaws of protest, the richastonishment of that girlghosting her way around the bases.

I could have played, I thought then.There is room for me in this world.Fair. Foul. Foul. Fair. Even nowI am calling them, calling them as I go.

(13)

Though the chair's rulings defy the standards of the game, they are not arbitrary. Nor is the chair some sort of Shakespearean witch casting verbal spells to entangle readers and cause social and political chaos. Indeed, instead of warning that doom will descend when Birnam forest approaches us, Willis's poems repeatedly urge us to go to the forests and mountains and measure our human standards against the sheer presence of a Creation that exceeds all the lines we impose on it. These poems—like the umpire's decisions—seek to follow a humble, ad hoc standard that is tuned to moral and aesthetic truth. These judgments will unsettle readers—we may be like the graduate student who thought he hit a home run and now has to return to the plate and try again. But we may also be unsettled by a deep, unexpected joy, the "rich astonishment'' of the girl ghosting around the bases. Willis draws his poetic foul lines in such a way as to crowd out the complacent and make ample room for the marginalized.

Several poems, for instance, expose the human penchant for drawing lines that shut out our neighbors. In one poem, he describes "the walls of Montecito,'' an exclusive community in Santa Barbara inhabited by movie stars and celebrities. While these walls stand to keep the wrong sort of people out, the inhabitants obscure this exclusionary function by displaying tokens of faux welcome on their gates:

On those gates a woven pair of wreaths appear at winter solstice,beribboned and electrified—wreaths large and hollow,empty-eyed, decking the walls, the walls, the walls.

(21)

Willis's description of these empty-eyed wreaths indicts us for our tendency to prettify the boundaries we draw to insulate ourselves from others.

And if readers are tempted to exempt themselves from this tendency, to draw a clear line between the "we'' who are open and neighborly and the "they'' who are exclusionary, Willis refuses this easy satisfaction. In another poem about neighborly walls, he alludes to the famous judgment in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall'': "'Good fences make good neighbors.''' While the neighbor in Frost's poem "will not go behind his father's saying,'' Willis does so by contrasting two different neighbors. When the poet's back fence begins to fail, he goes to meet his neighbor for only "the second time in four years,'' and this neighbor offers to fix the fence on his own: "'No worry,' said Joaquin, / 'we fix. You have otra / problema''' (19). This other problem would be their side fence, which had already collapsed. Yet this fence may or may not be repaired:

Those neighborswe know better, and standin the gap with them

talking of wind, of the lineageof tract homes, and watchthe dog leap back and forthbetween two worlds.

Both sets of neighbors are good, and the poet comes to know each better through the failure of his fences. But the poem, like Frost's, suggests the relationship between fences and neighbors is complicated...