Words Spoken, Words Unspoken. - book reviews

Christian Century, March 13, 1996 by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

THIS HANDSOMELY printed book is the second in the series of poetry volumes published by Chimney Hill Press, founded by Jack Hiller of the Valparaiso University School of Law. Hiller's mission is to publish the work of worthy poets who have appeared in leading journals and literary magazines but who have not had major books in print. Edward Byrne, a professor of American literature and creative writing at Valparaiso, has published widely, has won numerous awards, and was a finalist for the Elliston Book Award for his poetry collection Along the Dark Shore.

Byrne's poems attempt to capture the experience that T. S. Eliot once likened to the fleeting laughter of children playing in the garden--sounds and glimpses of the transcendent which human beings, especially artists, are now and then privileged to perceive if they cultivate an intense watchfulness. Watchfulness is itself a major theme in this volume. In "Keeping Watch," the poet describes waiting for the whistle of the evening's late train: "I keep watch, knowing I will not be able/to sleep until the last bloom dissolves./Then I wait for the silence that follows/like a sheet unfolding, and turn into it." Between waking and sleeping, between what is spoken and what is not, the poet maintains his precarious balance--like a trapeze act described in another poem--a feat which seems almost impossible, and which in less skilled hands would be fatal.

In the title poem a father teaches the vocabulary of sailing to his son, and in the process gives him a landscape of known objects. The son becomes a namer who is constantly watching at the window for the father who never returns. In another poem two elderly women sit in their rockers, laps covered by quilts, watching for another absent father. In a satisfying reversal to this theme, the volume's final poem, "Grace Notes," describes the poet's new son who "only hours old, carefully curls both hands, high/as his arms will allow, above his head, reaching/blindly into the uncharted air around him."

The father considers the world that waits for this child, the experiences of meadows, mountains, tides, the "enormity of the lifelong plunge/to which he was now committed," and concludes that "nothing prepares us. Innocence ensures surprise at each grace note nature offers." A lesser poet would have ended the poem there, but Byrne continues, making those connections which the genre demands. He tries to decide which words he "could use to tell--/should one decide it were right to confide such things--/how it feels to be a father . . ." The words he opts for make his poems visual and even painterly. These are the words that evoke "surprise at each grace note" the poet offers.

As for the words unspoken, they are here too, in the silence of dreaming or the silence of the one who watches and records. The speaker, wordless, hides in tall weeds as his sister calls him, or he stands behind a tree watching his first love: "Her small faults undone by their distance/he sees only the perfection he wants/to see." Like the child who so often is a voyeur of an adult reality he can never fully engage, the poet watches, listens and memorizes.

Lest one conclude that the artist never acts but merely comments, Byrne's stunning "Indiana Dunes: After Chase's The Bayberry Bush" uses the painting by William Merritt Chase to reveal just how present the artist is in the work in which he doesn't actually appear. The painting shows Chase's three daughters playing on the dunes of Long Island,

the oldest, Alice, trying to hide

behind a lush shrub of bayberry,

staring out at her father, hidden

behind the same bayberry

bush, full

and flowering on his stretched

canvas.

The poet, reminded of another Alice, his grandmother, caught in a photograph with her two sisters, also on Long Island, suddenly is filled with questions he wants to ask:

And I wondered about your childhood

on Long Island. Did the three of you

chase one another through the tall grass

along the shore? Did your skirt hem catch

on the scrub brush? Did you pick berries

with your sisters? Did you try to hide?

Did you know that you'd be the one to know the pain of loss? Did you know

something no one else could ever know?

The poet concludes that he is not really after specific answers. He stares at the photograph and realizes that he is seeing what the photographer saw. In fact, he becomes the photographer as he looks at his grandmother, just as he stands in the place of the artist painting the canvas of Alice hiding in the bayberry bush, looking out at him. The photographer, the painter, the poet establish relationships with subjects who meet their gazes directly. As readers, we also participate in this endless mirror-within-a-mirror as we see and hear and become the silent watchers, privy to the glimpses of reality we encounter only rarely in our everyday lives, and therefore reach for eagerly when the artist hands them to us, neatly framed.

Byrne does what only the best poets can do--he makes connections which go beyond the landscapes that can be described in spoken words, and he points to those truths which can never be fully captured in language.