The real things ...

 

Woman Lake, poems by Richard Broderick

New Rivers Press, paper, $13.95

ISBN: 0898232015

reviewed by Michael Finley
Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

It's too bad that I am writing a review of Rich Broderick's first collection of poems, Woman Lake, from New Rivers Press. That is to say, it is too bad it is me writing it, because Rich and I are friends. But in this poetry-averse world of ours, if your friends don’t write nice things about you, you can just about kiss it. Think about that next time you see any positive review.

It is doubly too bad when a book is really good, which Rich's is. Woman Lake is very reachable and "there" for readers, simple stories about events and observations that usually morph into something deeper and more mysterious. His poems do what poems are supposed to do -- they take something familiar, allow you to examine it in your hands, until you locate the secret inside that makes the object holy or heartbreaking or hilarious.

I hear it in "Hanging Laundry Out to Dry," a poem about his mother -- "the last generation of mothers to make clothes by hand" -- pinning clothes to a line. It seems to be about shirts and sheets and washday, but as you read it, it enfolds you like billowing sailcloth:

 

I think now
of her lips, the tastes her mouth must
have held over time: wood and steel,
stone and soil, and finally ash.

 

Hey -- all of life is in those lines, all our striving and eating and dying. And Rich gets to it with a homely memory of his mom in a New Jersey backyard. It is very lovely.

In a companion poem, "Lost in Audubon's Birds of America", Rich thumbs through the old lithographs of birds in their natural habitats -- and suddenly is seeing his father's death:

 

             ... the evening
that divides everything into before and after,
as if in dying he fled into this book
to furl his wings in the feather of my eyes.
 

It is more than melancholy that pulls the poet and reader deeper into these poems. I sense an enormous yearning, in a world of cheap distractions and pretensions, for the things of substance, the real things, the hard-won achievements of those who have gone before, and those who are yet to blossom. One of the nicest poems is this one about his daughter Emma ("Photocopy of My Daughter's Face"). This poem begins as whimsy, which is then put in the service of a parent's terror, the image of one's offspring frozen like a fly pressed in amber. Here is the poem in its entirety:

 

Young girl, trapped beneath the ice,
What are you trying to tell me?
That life is a cold, deep well,
A series of gray tones
Falling off suddenly into black?
 
This distortion makes the living
Look and shiver.
How long must you wait, child,
Face pressed against the light?
In what world will you wake up
And take your next breath?

 

I like very much the unmistakableness of his approach and tone; it's very hard to misread Rich Broderick. He takes care to guide the reader in and through his ideas and images. He's very much a controlling poet in that sense, sure-footed and well-plotted, and he reminds you that poets are supposed to be guides.

Also recommended is a 30-line poem, "Repairing the Five Story Globe," about a replica of our planet on display on the campus where Rich works. Somehow the plastic continents of the globe had come askew, and a girl from the exhibit company was refitting these tectonic sections via a crane. She floats at the end of a cable, restoring the earth to its proper condition. The poem is by turns sexy and mythopoeic:

 

Dressed in shorts, T-shirt
and climbing boots,
she rappels down the slope
of the Northern Hemisphere
fits one boot into the Yucatan
And commences to set
Jamaica right....

 

Some final observations based on my association with Rich. I have known him for 15 years -- and we really should have known each other longer, because we were both in town writing and hawking our poems through the fabulous 70s.

When we finally did meet, we discovered we shared some of the same prejudices and antipathies -- and what bonds a friendship faster than that? Well, we’re guys (and both journalist-poets, so naturally a little competitive) so friendship took a couple years to develop. When we are at a loss for conversation, we still haul out those old stories and sort through them again.

The thing I want to say is that if you come to him by these poems alone, you are meeting only his most peaceful and profound self. His everyday self is very funny and fierce in its convictions. I have never known Rich to be unafraid of having an opinion, about anything. He told me once that his father, whom he adored, and who died when Rich was a teenager, raised him to be nobody's fool. You had to stick up for yourself on the docks of New York City, where his dad pulled his weight as a young man. Show vulnerability and you'll never hear the end of it.

But these poems about grandmothers and grandfathers, and mothers and sisters, and daughters and sons, about transoceanic crossings and the still moon over a Minnesota lake, speak to a more complex insight. They say our struggle and suffering reveal both what is heroic in us and the fragility that is our human signature. And what can we do but honor our efforts, and grant safe passage to all departed souls:

 

They look so peaceful, spinning
and rolling slowly into the arms
of the water, their white limbs folding
and unfolding with the limbs of the river.
I watch until they disappear, until they drift
Out of sight around a distant bend.