Michael Daley reviews Gary Thompson's Broken by Water, Salish Sea Years

Broken by Water, Salish Sea Years,
Poems by Gary Thompson

ISBN: 978-1-6254938-4-2
Turning Point Books, Cincinnati, Ohio
www.turningpointbooks.com

2021, paperback, 96 pages, 6 x 9, $19.00

The Salish Sea poems of Gary Thompson

A review by Michael Daley

The more I read Broken by Water the more I find myself stopping after one or two poems, putting down the book and saying, sometimes out loud—wow, these are really great poems! (I know, I know—I can hear you saying along with my old teachers: “What the hell kind of a way is that to start a review? Tone it down already.”) Still—one after another these poems carve out a masterpiece of praise. Each one slides neatly inside its columnar sheath—the form is at one and the same time action and observation which delivers real experience as each swing of a line brings its own tension, ships us out onto the wave pattern of the Salish Sea. The best “praise of place” poems give poets a chance to step out of the poem or to be a minor character. Yet the praises here deliver a poet’s range between joy in the paradise of the sea and terror in unexpectedly striking land.

 It’s the specificity of these poems—I suppose we could call it “groundedness” except that we are on the water for most of the book—a specificity of attention, that allows us to stay with the poet, to feel we are on-the-spot when the moment of noticing, or the first “aha” occurs. Thompson could very well be pointing at what is striking him in the moment. This is certainly the skill that Yeats encourages in “Adam’s Curse,” though poetry’s not that poem’s subject: A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought . . .

Although Thompson doesn’t insert the first person singular, and in fact uses few pronouns, he sets us up to stand beside him—in the harbor watching birds in the title poem’s first part of a question, Who hasn’t been broken / by water, first lines that suggests what we all have in common—birth, the water breaking, but also grief, fragility, some kind of damage. And the second part of the question, . . . and those / that take to water, brings up the glide landing of birds on the surface of Yukon Harbor. The poem follows with a refrain beckoning us to praise distinct waterfowl, birds which are over there, the poem suggests, right there in front of us. Praising begins with the American Widgeon—one species of Widgeon recently extinct, the most extreme type of broken. Even in Thompson’s description of the birds feeding, the title’s brokenness reverberates, tails turn into beaks, while grebes, mallards and their hens resound in the harbor and, recording the haughtiness of the mallard, overlap with the kingfisher’s regal loneliness just as, quickly and as lonely, Christ is perched and looks down. By the final stanzas we are reminded that this is all a moment’s observation as the poem circles back to extend its first line and its title into the world of horn blasts, scared birds and their flight. In the end, our familiar working day brings those who take to water to take to air. The simplicity of observation slipping away from the “craftiness” of poem-making, allows eye and ear to follow the unconscious where it leads in plain language, subtle rhythms and leaps throughout Broken by Water.

It’s the specificity of these poems. . . that allows us to stay with the poet, to feel we are on-the-spot when the moment of noticing, or the first “aha” occurs.

The book’s second section demonstrates the authentic if not primal art of taking to water by its title, “Invent the Boat,” the poems emblematic of the present. Not the present workaday world, but the 21st century survival-at-sea mode. And as such this handful of poems insists on the book’s subtext, breaking:

Any boat will break
a lubber’s bank.
A broken boat will break
an old salt’s crust.
Any damn boat will break 

(“First Lesson of Boats”) 

The poems assume a familiarity with actual places, and I did treat myself occasionally to a map and sometimes pictures of the Salish Sea: the book’s subtitle and a relatively new geographic term, its history of naming explained perfectly in Thompson’s note about his poem “A Postcard From the Salish Sea.” Such goings-on-outside-the-text matter less as places and structures offered for reference than the imagined past held to the mirror of present reality. This is a book in which the historicity of a poem can be proven to radiate an authentic world, endangered and cherished.

In the arena of lived experience, the third section of Broken by Water takes us into the presence of several significant figures from the era of early white and indigenous contact. These “Northwest Likenesses,” a word appearing in three titles of poems in this section, seem to echo such literary devices as simile, metaphor, and so on, allusion even, yet, like much of the book, the word essentially names real things, photographs. In this section we find the poet reacting to pictures of James G. Swan (pleased with himself), and another photograph of Chief Sealth’s daughter taken by Edward Curtis. We also learn something of the history of Swan’s travels in the Northwest, and his origins (a Boston / who arrived in Port Townsend . . .). In another poem, we find Swan at the Smith Island Lighthouse with Keeper John Vail, and learn that The Haida scare the bejesus / out of everyone. One very short poem here takes us from the 1854 racist treaty enacted by then Governor Stevens to the Boldt Decision of 1974 (“The Question of Who”), while another acknowledges the travesty of vandalizing Chief Sealth’s grave.

 The variety of bonuses in reading a book of poems that inform is not only the information itself, but the language with which these poems quietly sing: “Keats coughing,” the threatening sounds his boat, Keats, makes, a boat that, as the book picks up, seems to be an alter ego. Those two words begin the poem, “A Beacon,” about halfway through this section. The first part of the poem gives us the scene: a boat broken where it’s Much too deep / to drop anchor. Hence the cough that will be explained as: Keats has broken down off Smith Island, / halfway across the Strait. The word broken occurs three times in this poem; and does so frequently throughout the book. In this case, the word indicates a time to reassess; we are allowed to see the event is not what this poem is about. Waiting for a tow, the poet and crew can

…calm ourselves down
as one becalmed
in an afternoon autumn sun.

And then begins a meditation on the history of Smith Island and its lighthouse 

…the one that stood
a century or more before it slid

down the wave-battered bluffs
of the Salish Sea.
The tower bright-washed, the coned roof

red as the eye can see. The light new
again as in 1859—and there’s Swan,
the newcomer, the curious correspondent

who is finding his way
in these NW waters. James G. Swan,
like a beacon himself

as he stands there in my imagination,
the beacon of 19th century words
that beckoned . . .

With this lengthy quote from a much longer poem, I want to draw your attention to just one example of this poet's craft honed over deceptively simple lines. Following the indirect rhyme, stood. . . slid, they keep coming as half-rhymes, end-rhymes, internal-rhymes: bluffs. . . roof. . . himself. . . Sea. . . eye. . . see. . . way. . . 1859. . . Swan. . . beacon. . . my imagination, and beacon. . . beckoned. . ., all within the simple rocking rhythms of Keats awaiting rescue. The poem concludes, in fact, with two references to the Romantic poet. One is to a poem Swan almost certainly would have known and might have had in mind as he, in the poet’s imagination, looks out at Keats from Smith Island, and the other to the famous lines in stone for his name writ in water. Yet another echo of the book’s title. The condensing of such references within such condensed language almost allows us to witness poem-making as a kind of emotional and intellectual puzzle creation so tightly are these lines held together within the frame of “Keats coughed,” Swan the observer, and Keats’ death by tuberculosis. Swan’s own grave marker appears two pages later, in the final poem of this section, yet, unlike Keats’, bears no words of his own.

The many topics Gary Thompson’s poems address include Social and Climate equity, environmental fears and concerns, family and community, racism and colonialism. That is, so many of our present dangers. “Wind SSE” depicts extreme weather and threats to his island community’s survival, but in Thompson’s poem “Worn Down from Reading” he captures both the changes in climate and our tendency to disbelieve our eyes, and read a “me-me memoir,” for instance. The poem ends recalling for all of us the John Donne poem we learned as children and which echoes through these times of drastic climate change, “No Man is an Island.” These opening lines of that poem hint that climate change can’t be reckoned, nor addressed, in terms of typical nationalism:

Worn Down From Reading

yet another midlife
me-me memoir
in manuscript, I get up
from the desk and out
to a world that always
means something. Today
it means to do us in,
or give us hell trying
NOAA warns.
A monster
storm is at the coast
aimed our way. Power’s
already out in Cowichan,
and when it crosses
Haro Strait, the storm
won’t be clearing 
Customs before it smacks 
us too.

Michael Daley poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Rhino, North American Review, Writers Almanac, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, Jeopardy, Prairie Schooner, Cirque, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cascadia Review, and elsewhere. Founding editor of Empty Bowl, publisher of the Dalmo’ma anthologies, former Poet-in-Residence for the Washington State Arts Commission, Skagit River Poetry Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, he retired from teaching at Mount Vernon High School in 2012. His reviews and essays have appeared in Pacific Northwest Review of Books, Raven Chronicles, Port Townsend Leader, and Book/Mark Quarterly Review. His collections of poetry include: The Straits (Empty Bowl, 1983), To Curve (Word, 2008), Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010), Of a Feather (Empty Bowl, 2016) and Born With (Dos Madres, 2020). He has been awarded by the Washington State Arts Commission, Seattle Arts Commission, Artist Trust, Fulbright, and the National Endowment of the Humanities. Pleasure Boat Studio published his essays, Way Out There (2007), his translation of Alter Mundus (2013) by Italian poet Lucia Gazzino, and has just released Telemachus, a novel. Dos Madres Press of Ohio has just published Reinhabited: New & Selected Poems.