Watermarks
by Laura Burkhart
Published by Wild
Sage Press
Reviewed by Eric
Greenway
ISBN
978-0-9881229-3-2
Watermarks, Laura Burkhart’s second book of poetry, will make you
laugh. You can hear the poet’s glee in many of these poems—and you wonder how
she maintains such fine control of language while giving herself over to all-out
play.
The levity begins
with the first poem, “Advice from Noah’s Wife”, who can “hardly breathe halfway
through, let alone tell Noah he should have hired a female ark-tech who knows
the ins-and-outs of cleaning.”
It’s fitting that a
poet who achieves a high level of playfulness with language should include a
poem about strategically placing the word “Envy” on a (somewhat altered) Scrabble
board, then topping that move with an even better score—“well let’s just
say/your fellow players will turn/a not-unpleasant shade of green/when you also
use all seven/letters for the 50-point bonus.”
In “Writing the
Old Frogs Home” the amphibious narrator admits that “Maybe this frog/hospital
doesn’t even exist/outside our own lily-/livered minds. Maybe this/is really a
frog-leg emporium/and that’s why there are so many/wheel chairs down by the
pond.” And, from the same poem, have you heard the one about Mr. Weber, the
tenth-grade chemistry teacher? We watch him “roll mercury around the palm/of
his hand while the class recited/the periodic table boron, boron,/boron…”.
Of course, Watermarks is not all fun and games—and even
at its funniest moments, we apprehend something darker under the surface.
Mercury is lethal after all, and Noah’s wife is well-placed to make a comment
or two about male privilege.
To start with, Watermarks is a subversive title for any
paper-and-ink book. After all, a watermark is not there to be noticed—unless
you have a specialist’s interest in the lineage of paper or the authenticity of
postage stamps and banknotes. The title suggests that what’s most worthy of your
attention is what is normally overlooked, something in a realm that is beyond
the veil of text and the page.
Offering glimpses
of the ineffable may be a poet’s stock-in-trade—but it’s not often achieved as
breathtakingly as in some of these poems. Burkhart navigates the knife edge between
technical mastery of language and the courage to surrender control, to give in
to the “strange animal” that “steals my thoughts”.
The poet’s voice
in “Anniversary” is spare, refuses to call attention to itself. Marking the
year that has passed since an ex-husband’s accidental death, the poem’s opening
lines (“Early morning gap between/birdsong quiet as death./I open red curtains.…”),
direct our focus, not to the words of the poem, but to the silence that the words
gesture towards. The uncurtained window is like the poem itself, almost
transparent, an opening for the reality-beyond-the-poem.
In a similar vein,
“Dream of the Dead” steers clear of poetic effects, employing language that is stripped-down
and conversational: “My father is still dead./I’ve seldom thought of him/these
last five years, and then, usually/with an arrogant kind of pity”. Later in the
poem: “When he was dying he asked me: is this/all there is? You’re born, you
live, you die?” The power of the poem flows from simple, unadorned details,
closely observed—“…a shadow/silent in the hallway when I pass,/sitting with Reader’s Digest at the kitchen table….”
Beyond the
geographies of love and death and sexual
politics, landscapes are woven throughout Watermarks,
exotic and not-so-exotic —a Southeast Asian market, Regina in winter, a summer
morning in Vermont, a textiles shop in Egypt.
But the landscape most
present in these poems is the Big Island of Hawaii, the writer’s home. It’s a
place of contradictions, temperate and fruitful, with mangoes “…poised/On the
branch like a word of wisdom.” But it’s also an island with a long-active volcano,
where the earth beneath your feet may prove anything but firm. “Where will you
be when the earth trembles/like an enraged lover?” is the question posed by “In
Both Languages”. “How will you translate into meaning/what you grab to take
along?” Where the land may prove volatile, “Sound of Water” suggests that it is
better to learn to trust the ocean that “holds me drop/by drop when I plunge/off
rocks. I can no/longer see the spray—/beneath the waves is silence.”
The language of Watermarks is
finely-crafted—intelligent, witty, impeccably cadenced, a sensual pleasure to
read aloud. But the genius of this exceptional collection is that it invites us
beneath the surface, to a place beyond language, to silence and mystery.
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