The Literary Review
Issue 10
Reviews Page 7
Frank Murphy Reviews:
New and Selected Poems 1960-2020
by Donald Gardner
Donald Gardner was the first Featured Poet chosen for Home Planet News Online. In addition to being an excellent poet, he is also an acclaimed translation of Octavio Paz’s long poem, The Sun Stone (Cosmos, York 1968), and of Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity (Cape, 1970). In 1915 he won the Vondel Prize for his translations of Dutch master Remco Campert. He is also well known for the performances of his poems.
In his latest book, New and Selected Poems 1966-2000, Donald takes the reader through thirty-four years of his exceptional and highly enjoyable poetry. His poetry is about change, about the transforming of self, society, and language itself.
Donald’s poems are often personal, coming out of something he experienced as in the example given in the first poem in his book. In this poem he uses the image of a traveler as a metaphor for his journey from place to place, time to time, complex to simple, ordinary to extraordinary. Donald, a master of narration reminiscent of Paul Blackburn, transforms a simple taxi ride in Mexico City into a poem that is both poignant and dreamlike. IN MEXICO CITY is a poem straight out of the Viet Nam era, a poem of sudden transformation.
IN MEXICO CITY
Packed in a taxi like luggage
uncomfortable
like someone getting ready for Munich
how can I tell the driver
I am not a gringo?
I want to apologize
for Vietnam
but not pay more than five pesos
or miss my bus
or dare those faces
out of the starving tenements,
a bad man plagued by time.
But taking a sudden corner
give the driver all my change
and am not longer English or American.
I am the rain that beats my face
I was at the first reading Donald gave at St. Mark’s Church.I remember the standing ovation we gave him after he read an anti-war poem where the words, “sheep shit,” were prominent. The Vietnam War was, like bad acid, like Napalm, burning our minds away, scaring our minds The first time I read For The Flames, I was captured by the cadence of his lines, an almost biblical rhythm that bangs like a battle drum throughout the poem, enhancing his dynamic imagery. His use of simple phases like, “I think” and “It is” moors each line, and resolves them into music.
FOR THE FLAMES
In the matter of travelling light I think that these men are
exemplary.
They must have whittled their lives down to an ultimate
simplicity,
clean as a white bone polished by the sea. They have moved
on a stage ahead of us.
They have dropped a long line into empty space and found
it anchored
a little way beyond all dialectics and metaphysics.
Buddhist, Christian and Marxist are drawn here to the same
elementary conclusion.
I think it is a simple voice that speaks to us out of these
fames.
I think it is like a clean white bone stuck in the throat of
governments.
It speaks to us in the interstices between civilizations.
The horror stories in the afternoon editions are of a brus
completely different order.
The roar of burning kerosene becomes here almost an
incidental accompaniment
and the hot wind from these flames shouldn’t make us shy
of coming closer
and listening with an ear tuned in to the other side of
silence.
Donald’s use of the phase, “clean white bone”, echos the ultimate simplicity of the lines above. His use of the word, interstices, is spot on. What better word to capture that narrow space between civilizations, the space where transformation suddenly turns from one thing to another?
I think the voice coming out of the flames is a wounded voice, a burned voice, a voice that is at once a voice the poet must listen to and a voice the poet must create because it is a voiceless voice until he does.
It is the voice of a few people with exceptional daring.
Magically they have become part of the air which
surrounds us.
It takes our breath away. It gives our breath back to us.
It throws the question back at us: who are we?
It elevates us to where we are, to a high windswept plateau,
hungry for love. crying for home, naked in a world gone
mad.
It is a hard voice brought to us on a bitter wind in a bitter
time,
hammering home the necessity of our exile.
It is the most enduring voice I have ever heard.
Donald always had a clear idea of what he wanted out of a poem, and what he doesn’t as seen in his early poem, The Road South, Edinburgh to London. I love the way he describes England…
Whether we go south or north
is unimportant.
This is a small country.
You can roll it up like a map,
put it in your bluejeans pocket
or hang it on a line to dry.
It is studded with sad-eyed student poets
coming on like they’re Gary Snyder.
The woods are full of them.
They leave their picnic litter of
stoned zen lyrics written in
desperate circumstances in
single bedsits in Sheffield, Doncaster, Derby.
There’s not room in the country for all this poetry.
There’s not room in the country for all this stoned
earnestness.
Because there’s no room they become terribly earnest.
Because there’s no room, a terrible inwardness.
and brings his ideas of what poetry should be…
I want the poem to dictate
as the road dictates
our direction.
I want the poem
that says north
where it reads south.
I want the poem
with such a high frequency of inwardness
when it explodes the country goes up too.
I want it to
burn out the barrier
between the imaginary and the so-called real.
In his poem, New Plan, a poem dedicated to the Dutch poet Remco Campert, Donald gives us a look into what drives him as a poet. once again comes back to renewal,
like Carroll’s tortoise, you taught us:
the poet moves slow
but is unstoppable.
You renew yourself.
You get your goal.
You become your poetry
and move on again,
driven restless
by that midnight muse,
who didn’t let you down,
who never lets you go.
A few years ago I wrote wishing Donald a happy birthday. He replied back, “Frank we have seen so much history.” So true. We witnessed the ending of a war by protest only to encounter new wars. We witness social changes that have surpassed our expectations in good way and bad. And out of this history Donald Gardner has carved out a dynamic poetry capable of expressing it all. New and Selected Poems is a book to be read and read again. I have, and each time I am blown away by his insight, his humor, his skill of craft, and his humanity