Nature Boy: A Review of Edward Abbey

Review of Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside by Edward Abbey

Holt Publishing, 1984

Edward Abbey--who reflects not only a personal need for expatriation and that delicate hint of misanthropy in my demeanor --has subdued Bruce Springsteen’s place in my heart.  Abbey’s Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside seems, at first glance, easy to dispense with as another example of environmentalist earth-mother literature. But for one sufficiently sensitive to the nuances of writing in this genre done well, a reader is able to see like Abbey, feel like Abbey, and travel with Abbey through “Eden at the dawn of creation.”

In Abbey’s essay collection, notwithstanding its focus on the cascade  of nature's plethora, one can see signs Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan and their ideas on how the tools of technology have red-lined the natural tools of society: humanity’s own brain power and its ability to use that power having become dependent on a technology of effortlessness.

To be fair, Abbey had me harboring some guilt of my own as I took a distinctly indoor pleasure in this book of the outdoors.  Abbey travels natively and minimally, carrying only what is necessary to survive, not to live comfortably in a technologically-dictated world.  He brings water, careful observation, and a decisive love for a rough and unlovable desert region, reminding readers that nature is intended for all, not merely the affluent who purchase land only to destroy it by building million-dollar homes and strip malls.  As McLuhan says, “affluence creates poverty.”  Abbey’s desert wasteland exemplifies in its unique way that sad fact of modern civilization.

Much like Neil Postman’s Technopoly, Abbey’s Beyond the Wall illustrates in tender detail how we have quite literally given up everything that gives meaning and direction to this ephemeral, all-too-rapidly lived life, clawing, like kittens, at the conveniences technology dangles in front of us.  Abbey forces his readers to question their decisions, their comfy cubicle chairs, their guaranteed health insurance and to get up and let “the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse [their] reverie” and do something that does not leave them just emptier.  Emptiness--even in a barren desert--is not inevitable, and maybe readers need Abbey to remind them of this.  In Abbey’s desert, it is the fact of this isolation—expatriation, as he terms it--that leads the imagination along to affluence of mind instead of bank account.

Dare I say that I find myself envying Abbey?  How he is able to find perfection in nothingness, in what appears as miles piled upon miles of destitution.  Having emphatically placed himself in a location from which anyone else would willingly die to escape, he is happy.  He is at peace as a “desert rat.”  I find myself secretly desiring to hitchhike back to the farm between a cornfield and a horse ranch and to relish what I personally had forsaken for so long.

Moreover, his keen sense of specificity and willingness to violate his readers’ comfort zones let him write with wit, perceptiveness, peacefulness, and a surprisingly brusque sarcasm—quite the change from your typical earth-mother literature!  If not because his inspiration or his sincerity, then for his wit and wisdom, one must appreciate Edward Abbey and dare to trek “beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security of fences . . . beyond the rage of lies that poisons the air . . . [to] another world waiting for you, . . . the old true world of deserts, mountains, forests, islands, shores, the open plains.  Go there.  Be there.  Walk gently and quietly deep within it.”

In the Sea's Grey Suit: The Poetry of Don Barkin

Review of That Dark Lake by Don Barkin Antrim House, $19

The misty mountains that grace the cover of Don Barkin’s That Dark Lake suggest what lies within this collection of poetry. It also bespeaks the atmosphere that pervades the sensibility of this New Haven poet. Barkin’s work is divided into four sections, each with its unique character, which at times creates a dissonance that can be either welcoming or off-putting by virtue of their congruity.

The energy that underwrites the collection, modified, as it were, by that darkness, is evident in poems like“Eighteen”:

In Springtime a young brook throws the whole mountain in an uproar.

It crashes through the rocks like a blind man in a hurry. Its froth leaps like a stallion’s spit in terror of the bridle.

Don’t get upset. Think of the day when you’ll smile a little sadly as the brook disappears in the sea’s grey suit.

At the age when in Western society, a child becomes an adult, Barkin captures the cusp of that transition through the liquid metaphors of “brook” and “froth” and “spit,” whose vigor dissipate into the grey stream of adulthood. In this respect, many of Barkin‘s poems bear the linguistic stamp of modernists like William Carlos Williams, who could capture and even subjugate readers’ hearts and minds with a few, simple words.

Sometimes Barkin constrains this rare prowess by letting stringent rhyme schemes tie down his lyrical, even chaste gems of insight. Fortunately this is not omnipresent, and many of the poems reflect the sincere, almost affable ambience, of That Dark Lake as a whole. The collection delves not just into human emotion but the everyday bustle of life. Experience serves as root and cause of all artistic experience in the world, that “lonely hour of the single light bulb,” as Barkin frames it. Consider such lines as

In the weight of the great trees on the lawn, In the timid, curving love Of the tree limbs on the bright grass, They can see that really Nothing ever goes anywhere

or

In middle age you smell the end The way you smell the snow …

Paradigms of innocence possibly lost suffuse Barkin’s voice. In the smallness of things lies the greatness of reality, of Being itself. And yet, the collection is domestically minded enough to grasp the solace offered--as this collections offers--mental creature comforts: a good book to pick up after a day of “rush[ing] off, then com[ing] back…walking in too fast” and listening to the “office women” gossip. It’s a book meant to slow you down, to remind you that “out there / water flows somewhere / and the quiet people rule.”

Seeing in the Dark

Reading Charlotte Garrett Currier’s Shadow and Light: A Retrospective left me conflicted: Had Ijust finished a book of poetry or listened to a Charles Auguste De Beriot movement? Currier incontestably has a vigilant ear for the metrical line unit, creating impeccable rhythms, balancing the traditional formalities of meter and rhyme scheme. Her work is a unique, eye-pleasing  integration of extant linguistic idiosyncrasies with avant-garde typography. Perhaps it is fortuitous that I do not have to answer my question of whether Currier writes poetry or composes music. As Dylan Thomas once offered, “Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.” At heart, the intent of poetry is to make the audience feel, and feel deeply, and Currier, through this highly metrical almost-memoir, certainly reminds us what it is to wholly feel—whether we wish to be so reminded or not.

Shadow and Light is divided into four sections (although an argument could be made that its "New York City Suite" qualifies as a fifth). Each section—more emotionally brazen and yet more private than its last—captures the shadow and light of wending through those most basic realities of life: contingency, stability, stagnancy. Even so, Currier concludes the book with a lightheartedness that supplies a welcome break from occasionally opaque verse, paying homage to former students, converging both the obscurity and the lucidity of memory. With each section, the audience is bound to poetic persona ever more tightly—sometimes, too tightly.

Shadow and Light is also visually poetic. The New York City Suite pages shift in layout to white print on black paper with short lyrical, witty poems staggered about the page and framed by reverse-image photo brackets. Pages come to resemble a personal photo board, adding an extra emotive power that forces the audience to engage at an altogether graphic level with the the ravages of memory. The black-and-white formatting throughout offers a tangible reflection of the title, immersing readers within remnants of “occasions forgotten or indistinguishable.” Solidifying the connections among memory, verbal artifacts (the poems), and relational reality, Currier shows no shame supplying personal dedications to several of the pieces. Both the layout and the poems offer each page a transparent physicality.

Following the arrangement by section, the poetry—like life itself—in Shadow and Light follows a series of phases, all organized under the unitary motif of relationship and memory. Embodied in poetic form, Currier pairs loss with humor, darkness with lightness, embracing memory within the corporeality of emotion. Her collection offers euphoric poems expressive of empathy and reflective in their proclivity to quip. In the end, her dexterous and sometime even volatile use of meter, held together with her voracious (at times wry) voice, provides readers with a look back at a life lived with the kind of honesty that oftentimes only poetry can deliver, or as Currier suggests: “These poems, like a long train journey, end at a place not yet home, yet not unknown.”