A Poet on Whom Nothing is Lost

Long Lens: New & Selected Poems is composed of eighty-six poems: the poet's choice of his best work from four decades. Most are from four earlier collections, with twenty-five new ones. Peter Makuck writes the poetry of a grown man—no word games, no victims, no ego-theme park, and nothing written in crayon on the windshield of a Hudson Terraplane barreling down route 66. Makuck's first book was titled Where We Live (1982), and his poems still arise largely out of daily situations like driving to work, washing windows, fixing a chair, having a drink, and walking across campus. When this poet gets exotic, he's skin-diving or casting a net for shrimp. Makuck never speaks through a persona who might be taken as someone other than himself, and though occasionally poems take place in locales like France, Spain, and Italy, or the American Southwest, the eastern seaboard from Maine to North Carolina is their chief setting.

His work is full of imminence, the sense that a revelation is in the offing, as in "Something invisible wants to be seen" or "I'm nearing something deep / as the ocean itself." Often, as in Yeats, the poems are set at twilight, when vision is occluded. The speaker keeps his eyes open for the fresh event, "the small good thing / that happens next"; and in interviews Makuck has quoted Theodore Roethke in support of his own "epic of the eyes": "By long staring I have come to be." He has also quoted the painter Thomas Hart Benton: "Place opens a door in the mind," and expanding on Benton, "When I read poetry or fiction, I want to feel the setting and atmosphere, want to feel a connection between speaker and place, not just some arbitrary background as is often the case in films."

Reading Long Lens, one is reminded of Kenneth Burke's deeming literature as equipment for living. Having lived and fished at the ocean most of his life, and trapped fur-bearing animals in streams and bogs as a youth, Makuck is keenly aware of flux, of the passage of time, and of the need to capture moments. In "Gray Removals" he observes how sometimes "the air clears, as if someone had focused a lens, / removed a moment from the day / and made it lively forever." To make moments lively forever is a solid program for a poet, and traditionally poets have called the attention of less alert folks to what is happening right under their noses but beyond their sight. For Makuck a flight of pelicans looks like "hedge clippers with wings"; a boy displays his fear with "his chin wrinkled like the stone of a peach."

Often a random event triggers memory, too, as when a ladybug lands on the speaker's wrist and suddenly he's recalling the orange vw bug he packed nearly a half-century ago to head off to college, with his mother tearful in his father's arms. Long lens, indeed. One of the salient themes throughout this collection involves those departed parents and the poet's gratitude for how they managed through tough economic times.

In "Prey" the speaker is crossing the college campus where he teaches, just as a redtailed hawk drops past his shoulder onto a squirrel. Nobody else appears to have seen this happen, though there are students and others walking about.

She presides with mantling wingsover the last twitches of gray as Iedge closer to her golden eye.She hackles her head feathers,    tightens her talons,

holds me prey to what I see,    watches meas she lifts off, rowing hard for    height, the squirreldrooped in her clutch.

To be able to capture this in such detail in its brief moment is the signature of the true poet—he's already writing the poem as he watches, someone on whom nothing is lost.