Reviews
Review of Dark Pool in Booklist,
March 2005
Howard is another American poet captivated
by Ireland to--one can't help thinking--the good of
his craft. He writes just about the most natural,
musical iambic line around these days, primarily in
a propulsive, precise, and vocal blank verse but also
in sonnets, quatrains, and unrhymed forms. It's as
seductive of the inner ear as Irish storytelling is
of the outer, gently drawing attention to large, subtle
meanings. And is any meaning larger than that which
courses through his work: that language creates the
world as much as the world creates language? The opening
poem excavates the millennium of Dublin's history
from its purely descriptive name: dubh linn--dark
pool. Many encounters with the garden lead, through
language, inward to memory and desire that in turn
mold outward development--the pruning of the plants
and their living impulse to grow. In the collection
closer, "The Holy Alls," a poet-like Howard, also
a musician--middle-aged at mid-century (1950) re-creates
himself through words and music (that other language),
others' as well as his own.--Ray Olson
Howard, Ben. Dark Pool. Apr. 2005.
88p. Salmon Poetry, paper, $18.95 (1-903392-32-2).
Review of Dark Pool in the prestigious
literary journal Shenandoah, published by Washington
and Lee University, Virginia
Ben Howard's fifth volume of poems
may be considered pilgrim poetry. To call it quest
poetry would be inaccurate, for "quest"
implies a definite end in mind; Howard's poem, "Sentence,"
which addresses the poet's deceased father and asks,
"Where are you now?", to the long concluding
poem, "The Holy Alls," which describes "that
bold dance, / Which once was called the making of
a soul / And now is called the finding of a self,"
these poems explore the meanings of being a rootless,
homeless wanderer admist the confusion and chaos of
the dawning new century. What gives these poems particular
power is the honesty with which they explore the poet's
lacks and absences, the gaps that he seeks to understand
in his own life through these poetic explorations.
The volume takes its title from the
ancient Irish name for Dublin, dubh linn, the dark
(or black) pool where the waters of the Liffey and
the Poddle converged. Howard is fascinated by Ireland,
and many of these poems explore what might be called
his adopted land. Much of his fascination comes from
Ireland's rich history of language, and its complex,
stratified landscape. Hence, a number of these poems
are place-name poems — including the title poem,
which describes Dublin as "City of the Names."
Naming — "employing names / To do the work
of knowing and unknowing, / The shaping and reshaping
of the story" — is one of the lingering
obsessions of these poems, for the name constitutes
a sense of secure being and knowing, "an odd
congruity of word and thing." Yet Howard recognises
that there is something within even the self that
always resists, or exceeds, the name; he longs "To
write a letter to that nameless one / Who in myself
appears from time to time." The rhythm of these
poems is always one of approaching and receding, gaining
understanding then falling back into uncertainty.
It is at times unclear if Howard resists certainty
out of a fear of losing the freedom of seeking, or
if he feels that certainty is an illusion to be avoided.
The Ireland poems of the collection
feature an outsider, highly self-conscious of his
non-native status. "The Holy Alls," the
422-line poem that concludes the volume (and is an
extension of sorts of Howard's marvellous poem-novella,
Midcentury (Salmon,
1997), opens with this question of belonging: "How
did it happen that an Iowan / Without credentials
or portfolio / Re-domiciled himself in County Clare
/ ... / Looking the part of someone's long-lost son"?
He imagines himself "As a Methodist's impression
of a pilgrim, / A thick-heeled parody of penitence
/ In search of something not unlike atonement."
This desire for atonement pervades these poems, and
part of Howard's project seeks to discover why the
poet feels this latent guilt, this incompleteness,
what he names "anxiety, / unrest, unease."
The "unrest" emerges from the restless,
unsettled, wandering life of the poems, and motivates
many of the ancestor and place-name poems. But as
he realises, Howard "can't call back the years
nor legislate / by any act of naming, my return /
to that remembered, half-imagined state / when name
and home and family were one." This realisation
comes at the end of a four-poem sonnet sequence in
the middle of the collection, which focuses on the
place-names of his youth, in Iowa. These poems attempt
to recall that time of unity, when names and things
were so easily conjoined, but the unity exists now
only in memory, despite the poet's attempts to find
reunion in Ireland, in the past or in his ancestors.
Another cluster of poems explores the
alternative spirituality of Zen Buddhism. The third
of the four sections opens with "Come and See,"
imagining Shakyamuni Buddha sitting in contemplation,
"Famously serene and not at all / Concerned with
what a doctrineless observer / Is thinking."
Another poem in this section, "Remembering Peace,"
responds to That Nhat Hanh's dictum, "to love
is to listen." These eastern spiritualities
function as both an alternative wisdom to the Methodist
Christianity that informs the ancestor and place-name
poems, and also as an ideal of peace and contemplative
repose that the poet constantly seks, but rarely finds.
Finally, the poems conclude with, not
a finding of home, but an assertion of nation —
a curious gesture in a collection that focuses so
much on Ireland, where nationhood has been a vexed
issue for centuries. In "The Holy Alls,"
the speaker shares stories with an Irish woman who
has lived for many years in America, just as he now
lives in Ireland. He concludes by imagining that each
one can now lay claim to his or her identity and place:
It seemed that
as I summoned up those stories
Out of a chamber better left
unlit,
I was uncovering a boundary
And sketching in the early
morning air
A native self, a national
enclosure.
I am of Ireland, she
might have said,
For all her heated, crackling
disapproval,
Her flattened brogue, her
dozen years in Boston.
And I, I might have truthfully
replied,
For all my travels and my
trafficking
In Irish ways, am of America.
The claiming of identity and nation
is provisional: it occurs only in recollection and
imagination. But these poems are all interior poems,
tightly-crafted modernist lyrics that emerge from
and return to the "I," and so this final
imagining of home has the ontological status of the
highest truth attained in the poems. There is both
gain and loss at the end: gain in the acknowledgement
of the poet's American past and the ineluctable sense
of roots and ancestry it confers; loss in the necessary
exclusion of the poems' other possible homes —
the Irish countryside or the spiritual bliss of the
mystic. One of the voices behind these marvellous,
poignant poems might well be aware of the Eliot of
the Four Quartets: "And the end of all
our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started
/ And know the place for the first time." ("Little
Gidding"). Ben Howard has crafted a volume rich
in memory, place and meditation — sustaining
reading for the new century. — Marc Connor
PRAISE FOR MIDCENTURY,
Ben Howard's earlier collection published by Salmon
in 1997.
Midcentury is a rewarding
read, its iambic pentameter like the beating of a
heart, its language by turns conversational and erudite
and its resolution moving, if not exactly comforting.
The narrator... emerges as a man of our own time,
slightly at odds with the ways of the world but human
and recognizably one of us. Patrick Chapman
Elegant, elegiac, casual yet
moving, Ben Howard's poetry is both contemporary and
classic. It spans eras and countries, fusing a fictional
voice with a poet's own real obsessions. Ben Howard,
besides being a fine poet, is a classical guitarist.
The structure of Midcentury is like a great symphony,
the kind that, moment to moment, is intimate, and
yet its overall reach is almost beyond human grasp.
Michael Stephens
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