Walt McDonald, All Occasions, University of Notre Dame Press
Norbert Hirschhorn, A Cracked River, Slow Dancer Press
A new collection from Walt McDonald is always an occasion to celebrate. This has never been more true than with All Occasions, a remarkable retrospective collection that records a lifetime in poetry, from childhood through manhood, marriage, wars, children, baseball, ranching, and open heart surgery. Quite an array - quite a life, a life that presses forward with all the vigor and insight that has always characterized McDonald's poetry. And here again, too, is that singular artistry with image and word - with the sheer music of language - that we have grown accustomed to [End Page 180] in previous collections like Blessings the Body Gave and Where Skies Are Not Cloudy. Listen to the ending of the Vietnam poem, "When Rockets Fell like Stars," in which the military buddies have tried to numb war's horror with beer, when "[n]othing beat / being drunk enough to die when bar girls screamed / and rockets fell like stars":
Roaring tunes
with country and western words in Saigon,
trying to ignore all falling fire, we staggered
back to sandbagged bunkers, daring the blare
of sirens to kill us, swearing we didn't care.
The more one looks and listens, the more impressive become both the complex play of McDonald's language - its intricate rhymes and echoes - and the interplay within his constellation of imagery. Again and again in All Occasions, one is struck by the technical brilliance that has long distinguished McDonald's work.
But there is far more here than just a brilliant surface. What lies beneath, within, is no less masterful, no less moving. Perhaps it is the reader's recognition that the collection really is a "lifetime in poetry" that lends the particular emotional and psychological depth to the poems it contains. Each seems to illuminate and enrich all the others, so that a baseball poem like "Batting Practice at Sixty," which appears in the volume's first section, functions both thematically and symbolically, both as an emblem of other poems' signs of aging and perseverance, of the toughness that ages without diminishing, and an antiphon that is answered in the fourth section (of five) by "Reading Ecclesiastes at Sixty." The first loops effortlessly to include memories of practices past - practices with children, before Vietnam, before Desert Storm - of the Yankees of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford, and of kids' summer leagues within a sage meditation on sport, age, and maturity. The wry humor that sneaks up on us in other poems appears here, too, in lines like these:
My turn to chase somebody's flies,
so I trot to third and flip the padded hat,
hoping for grounders, ready to scoop
and throw out my arm across the mound
to first.
That "out my arm" phrase nearly slips by unnoticed, but it is key to what McDonald is doing here and elsewhere, producing at once humor and pathos, playing with the rules of the game and the unsporting havoc that aging wreaks on our poor old bodies.
Indeed, All Occasions is filled not just with wisdom but with something more precious that has no formal name but that we might call "wiseness," a larger quality altogether, an indwelling ethos that shapes and informs everything and that we absorb and share merely by being in its presence. [End Page 181] Such is the heft, for instance, of what seem at first glance to be nature poems and that suddenly turn into something very different. This opening, for example:
Slopes with elk and sheep fall below us
when we climb over tundra past the snow
onto cliffs that mean no harm to climbers
or even mountain goats that fall,
or jet aircraft that crash.
("Search and Rescue in the Mountains")
Like the poems about ranching, camping, and flying (whether jet fighters or attack helicopters), the nature-based poems reveal always larger issues, directing us toward the often unsuspected links among natural objects, human artifacts, and the painfully fallible intelligence that operates upon both.
In many respects, All Occasions (whose title comes from one of John Donne's Christmas sermons, from 1624) is about what survives and sustains in the face of the great truth that Percy Bysshe Shelley had in mind when he wrote nearly two centuries ago, that "All things that move and breathe with toil and sound / Are born and die; revolve, subside and swell" ("Mont Blanc"). In McDonald's artistic vision, what sustains, preserves, and ennobles is, finally, love, the astonishing restorative power of human relationships, perhaps best epitomized here by McDonald's portrayals of his lovely gray-haired wife (in some of the finest contemporary love poems in print), his children, his old friends and military colleagues across several wars. This deep passion accounts for the explosive, haunting fury in "I Still Can't Say the Word," the startlingly brilliant poem on the death of a son at the hands of a drunk driver, a poem that gnaws at the consciousness long after one has read it, not just because the event is so disturbingly common today, but also because the emotional pain is made so terribly real to a reader.
This is also why poems like "Watching Parades in the Game Room," which document the premature loss of war buddies and the dissolution of others into age and enfeeblement, carry a poignancy and power that somehow transcend the ravages of time, an effect wholly different from the mere sentimentality into which such poems so easily could - and indeed would - degenerate under less skillful hands. One poem in this vein, "Killing Nothing but Time," resonates with echoes of another famous "old warriors" poem. Back in Texas, rancher, father, and neighbor once again, McDonald wears his ancestors (his Vietnam dog tags stored in the attic, he wears those of his uncle who died on Okinawa) and shares the aging ranchers' life with "other vets back from the jungles." Here is the conclusion:
Maybe something came back to them
last night, wart-faced and haunting, nothing else [End Page 182]
on these wide plains like Vietnam. But here together
we're safe, brave enough in boots and Stetsons, men
of the sunburned eyeballs, riding high over rattlers,
taking turns yelling jokes and shouting with laughter,
twisting and creaking in saddles, killing nothing
but time, riding home to our wives after dark.
Here, transplanted to the plains of west Texas, is the post-war restiveness to which Tennyson's great poem, "Ulysses," spoke insightfully more than a century and a half ago, the world of the war veteran who finds a world curiously - even uncomfortably - domesticated and who has recourse to the raucous company of aging compeers who have endured great struggles, great sufferings, and lived to tell about it. In the case of All Occasions, the telling is profound and eloquent. This is, indeed, a book - and a life - to celebrate.
In A Cracked River, a different sort of collection entirely, Norbert Hirschhorn sounds some comparable notes of mature and seasoned vision. Like All Occasions, A Cracked River favors the occasional fable, the enigma, and the mediation in exploring experience and aging. While Hirschhorn is also interested in the play of language, his verbal textures are less lush, less finely detailed, and less resonant than McDonald's (with the exception of a remarkable single-sentence poem of forty-eight lines, "He Sweeps the Kitchen Floor"). Instead, he provides sharp, often strident statements and unusual visual and typographic arrangements, whose (presumably intentional) rhetorical and visual disruptions reflect deeper disruptions within the narrator's tales. These tales run the gamut from observations on marital happiness and weariness, to reflections on his Jewishness and his now dead elders, and to both the victims of the Holocaust and those who, in escaping death, could not avoid the burden of all that horror. Hence it comes as no surprise that some of the poems also speak with a curious detachment that undoubtedly reflects Hirschhorn's international scientific perspective (he is a physician and acclaimed activist for health care in Third World nations), and that several others - like "Pupil Wei-Min Answers A Riddle" take the form of Zen-like parables.
The poems in this, Hirschhorn's first book-length collection, range widely over the author's experiences - perhaps too widely, since the volume seems more a "gathering" of discrete poems than a fully articulated and tightly-integrated fabric (a weakness that is exacerbated by the publisher's decision to reproduce Hirschhorn's numbered section headings only in the table of contents and not within the body of the book itself, where it more logically needs to be). Still, there are many compelling poems, the best of which discover the common threads among the seemingly very different lives and experiences of their subjects and the poet who relates them. A good illustration comes in the final section of "Cambodians [End Page 183] Celebrate The Buddhist New Year Once Again," where the following effectively detailed scene unfolds in Phnom Penh:
Whole families glide on single bikes; children
clasped together like still-warm
slices of bread. Young women -
side-saddle, coal-black hair loose
to the waist or pinned by chrysanthemums -
Barely touch the thighs and shoulders of young men.
I wish I could remember the High Holy Days,
when daughters of Jerusalem danced barefoot in groves
of figs, arbors of grapes, lilies in their hair,
in linen robes that spun up at their ankles,
singing out to the young men of Nazareth,
of Bethlehem. They danced after the sheep
was slaughtered, burnt whole and offered - a sacrifice
The Bible names The Holocaust, "all consumed."
Here and elsewhere in A Cracked River Hirschhorn's abidingly humane
vision graces a mature and philosophical poetry that gazes squarely into
the inescapable trauma of modem humanity and refuses to blink.
Stephen C. Behrendt
Stephen C. Behrendt's poems appear recently in Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, Ontario Review, and elsewhere.
