Cynthia R. Pratt reviews Bill Yake's WAYMAKING BY MOONLIGHT, New and Selected Poems

Waymaking by moonlight

A review by cynthia r. pratt

Bill Yake’s latest book of poems starts with the title poem, “Waymaking by Moonlight,” which sets the tone for, and brings us along with him, on his journey of language and metaphor. It is a trip over sometimes difficult terrain but allows the traveler to see what crosses our path at night, that which we often miss in the light. Looking up the definition of Waymaking, most dictionaries define it as providing a way, means, or solution (Yourdictionary.com). It’s important to keep this in mind since the title poem invites us on this journey. His bookend poem, “Heart Poem,” brings us back home, and recognizes we don’t have to be stepping on unstable rocks to be vulnerable.

But like most of his poems, this really isn’t so much about us and what surrounds us, “us” being at the center. It makes us part of this landscape, the world we see and the world we can’t see but know lies out there, in many cases disintegrating. Most know Bill Yake’s nature poetry, and at times, his ecopoetry. Waymaking certainly has an abundance of nature-themed poems. There is some poems, like “Letter to America—A Version in Which a Mirror Shatters,” where after reading it, I was left with no words left to say except, “Wow!” While not as long as Ginsberg’s “Howl,” it reverberates with a similar cadence. Here are a few random lines from “Letter to America”:

Dear America,

Once you were everything to me. Sky and river; brick-cobbled and gravel / streets.

You were the great basalt stones in the side lot,

You were Jack’s pompadour and Jackie’s leopard-skin pillbox hat.

America, you became a war. Again. And again.

They are the silence we can’t hear after the next-door pistol shot.

Some glue kept you barely from rupture, until it didn’t.

I who am you, beg you who am I—pull yourself, America, together.”

dedicated to
bill yake (1947-2022)

Some unique qualities about this manuscript are that it explores more with line breaks and layout, and with language, than in his previous books. Poems still have Yake’s thrall of science and scientific terms, something I can certainly identify with, having also spent a number of years within a science profession. However, he includes some personal poems, relationship poems that we rarely, if ever, hear him read. Two poems dedicated to his wife are lovingly tender. “Lake Quinault” for instance, which is dedicated to his wife, talks about identifying mushrooms, but then the third stanza begins,

 I was lost an hour into your present kiss—
in the flavor of mushrooms and mild earth,
 in the delicious lines of jaw and ear.

A poem titled, “A Son Out of a Long Absence” for Matthew, begins,

 You were born. The house burned down.

 The third stanza begins with a raw line,

 I hooked my fist into the belly of each year.

 It ends with finally an acceptance of self.

 There is nothing to learn here. Our lives
simply unfold as they burn without error.

It’s clear as one reads through this collection that Yake captures his many travels, from Spokane, where he grew up, to Mongolia and Kanai or Skidgate, Haida Gwaii. His unique take on these experiences unfolds with concise, visual words. From the poem, “Bodies,” it begins,

Old-time Haida knew bodies:
Split salmon and flensed whale,
harbor seal, otter, halibut, ligament
and bone.

Waymaking by Moonlight leads the reader through a life well-lived, but also, through terrain that requires all of us to think about this earth on which we tread, trip, stumble, and catch ourselves. It is a fitting ending to Bill Yake’s life, both through his philosophy that is wrapped into so many of these poems, but also through such specific details that describe how intricate we are woven in the tapestry of place. We have made it there and back and learned so much along the way. In my opinion, this is a powerful collection of poems, despite the collection’s length, and well-worth reading.

Cynthia R. Pratt is a founding member of the Olympia Poetry Network’s over thirty-year-old board. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, and in anthologies Godiva Speaks (2011), Dancing on the Edges (2017), and Garden of the Covid Museum (2021). One of her poems was accepted for display at the Seattle Salmon Strategy Summit 2005. Her manuscript, Celestial Drift, was published in 2017. She is a former Lacey Councilmember, Deputy Mayor of the City of Lacey for twelve years, and the first Poet Laureate of Lacey, as of 2022.

Waymaking by Moonlight,
New and Selected Poems
by Bill Yake

ISBN 978-1-7341873-4-2
LCCN: 2020944728

Empty Bowl Press, Anacortes, WA 98223
https://www.emptybowl.org/waymaking-by-moonlight-by-bill-yake

2022, paperback, 186 Pages, $20.