Catharine Savage Brosman’s latest book, Breakwater, is a stimulating addition to her always intriguing poetic realm. The book is packed with superlative individual poems, and their cumulative effect strikes this reviewer as majestic.
Breakwater is divided into three sections. Section I is an extended love poem involving the poet and the man to whom she was married some 40 years ago (and with whom she has serendipitously reunited). At the end of the book, she presents a “Postface,” which gives the past and present histories of this relationship. I advise the reader to go to this section before starting on the poems. Though they certainly stand on their own without explanation, the Postface adds a depth of understanding to the poems that makes experiencing them even richer. For most poets, Section I would be dangerous to attempt; it would be easy to slip into maudlin platitudes. But Brosman’s skill enables her to pull it off. The personal aspects of the poems—the romantic feelings and affirmations—are painstakingly developed out of impersonal, concrete physical settings (scenes from the American West) that, as the poet reflects upon them, become metaphors for the relationship. For instance, after five stanzas of descriptive passage about a landscape nearly destroyed by fire, she ends “In the Hayman Burn” by using this picture as a way of describing the wreckage left by the dissolution of her first marriage, but with a ray of hope that the relationship can grow back and be lasting this time:
. . . I do not have another fifty
years; I’ve got to take the forest as it is, half-
ruined, wishing things redone, imagining green life,
young trees, a chance to kindle a new fire in the heart—
catching, glowing steadily,
burning without loss.
Section II is primarily concerned with specific women in historical settings, a few well known, but most unknown to many beside the poet. Among various other themes, the majority of these poems follow the fortunes of these women in love relationships. With a few exceptions, these poems are narrative rather than lyrical (though Brosman’s gift for musical language is displayed throughout) and are cast in free verse or blank verse. The following stanza from “Louise at the Piano” will give the reader a sample of the general flavor:
. . . A bit of Czerny
and of Bach, for warming up, and then it’s Beethoven,
the “Pathétique,” the “Tempest.” She remembers
Fontainebleau that summer—thirty-nine—and Boulanger,
Casadesus, the other students, riveted to music,
while the war, collecting
leitmotivs . . .
Section III is harder to pin down thematically. Containing elements of both preceding sections, it is the most broadly philosophical section, and the final poems return to the natural world of the West as a backdrop to, and metaphor for, love, though on a more transcendent plane.
Sadly, we live in an age in which those considered the leading thinkers among our artists and liberal-arts academicians are overwhelmingly antagonistic to the concept of “meaning” and intolerantly suspicious of any deeper search for “truth” than what is either shallowly faddish or obsequiously politically correct. Nevertheless, often in the face of irrational hostility, Brosman has steadfastly maintained that there is definite meaning both to our individual lives and to the universe as a whole. She ends “In Unaweep Canyon” by contending that, by nature, man is a constructor of meaning:
. . . It’s the beauty of conciliation, something eye
and mind can do with shards and pieces of a life, a world—
half-artisan, half-god, refining, shaping matter
into meaning, gathering lines of force that seemed
irreparably bent apart,
composing them into a sheaf
of purpose, modulating strange desires by common chords.
The characters in her narrative poems often feel this sense of ultimate purpose, as the hero of “Burning in Louvain,” trying to save a priceless manuscript from being burned by the Germans, relates:
. . . On the way toward Ghent, I found
by Providence a small iron chest, cast off
and empty in a field. The woods nearby
were solitary: in the night I dug
a hole by scratching, dog-like, at the soil
and hacking roots. It was an
offering
to past, and future, time. As if my work
had been fulfilled that night . . .
Furthermore, Brosman asserts that we can discover in the Christian Faith the guiding principles behind all meaning and purpose. The doctrines that many other believers have expounded in prose she renders with poetic aptness in “Saint Séverin, I”:
. . . we’ll walk there now, recalling Cana’s wine
and benediction, gracious gifts from One who made
life more abundant, whose long torture—nailed
to a denatured tree, his body writhing in great pain—
caused earth to quake, split rocks, extinguished
day, and rent the veil of the old covenant,
until an angel pointed to the bare sarcophagus,
and light restored the world—stone, wood, and bodies
reconciled and whole, all holding heaven’s word.
Yet, more than mere doctrine, her beliefs culminate in personal experience, as in “Christ Pantokrator,” where she gazes on an altarpiece figure of Jesus in an Italian cathedral:
Anonymous, just strangers in a crowd,
like those who stood on a Judean hill
to watch, and heard Him as He cried aloud,
we know the power of His
passion still:
the letters come alive, the voice is clear,
as though, through two
millennia, we heard
the Christ Pantokrator among us here
proclaim, in words, Himself, the perfect Word.
Not only is her handling of subject matter deep, complex, and revealing, but Brosman is also a consummate master of technical skills. To the aficionado of traditional poetic craft (and Brosman is among the most traditional of contemporary poets), she offers a smorgasbord of delights.
Her poems continually erupt with innovative, often astonishing, metaphors that shed new light on events and processes. “In the Hayman Burn” describes the devastation of a forest ravaged by wildfire:
. . . aspen, pines, and fir, in green armadas
on the waving hillsides, stripped and charred,
their skeletons erect still, useless masts, or fallen,
driftwood, in the wreckage . . .
In “Wilkerson Pass,” she offers an entirely different picture—a living forest:
climbing, climbing through the bends, reaching
the altitude of ponderosas and the aspen groves,
girlish, gowned in white, heads fluttering,
And there is the unearthly beauty of her panorama of the sky in the same poem: “with all this sky flying above me / on its cirrus wings that brush the distance . . . ”
It is axiomatic in traditional poetic craft that the sound of a poem’s language should reinforce the sense of what that language says. Brosman creates some quite subtle and exquisite rhythmical effects in these poems. Take, for example, the comma pauses in the opening lines of “Breakwater,” which isolate words and phrases, making them “islands” within the lines, and the “swirling” rhythm of the second line:
No man’s an island, maybe, but this hump of concrete,
breaching the swirling current like a whale,
is one.
This passage is typical of her artistic control over rhythms in these poems.
Skillful alliteration and consonance create cadenced rhythms that stress the words involved. Brosman provides some scintillating examples in these passages from “Flying Straight”:
when flickers of St. Elmo’s fire ignite
the pools of darkness with their cypress dance.
. . . that very man
beside my bed—a buddy
salvaged from
the night, and Nam, and from delirium.
The sound effects of a poem are often heightened by rhyme. The most effective rhymes are known as “organic.” Organic rhyme occurs when the rhymed words exhibit a close semantic and/or rhetorical relationship, so that each modulates the sensitive reader’s experience of the other in a manner often similar to metaphor. Of the 49 poems in Breakwater, 22 are rhymed. When Brosman chooses to employ rhyme, she often achieves spectacular effects, as in these lines from “Éventail”:
a ’30s child’s kimono from Japan,
six coffee spoons of different
designs;
and this, my favorite, a
painted fan
of heavy pleated silk, with ivory spines—
And these from “Christ Pantokrator”:
His steady eyes appear to turn their gaze
on every viewer—deep,
unblinking, dark,
yet luminous and searching as the rays
that light the nave, the covenant’s new ark.
And two from “Fire Ring”:
The conflagration in the west burned low,
as if confined along a slickrock ledge,
then leapt, inflaming cirrus in
a show
of sanguinary feast at heaven’s edge.
The stars broke through the darkness with a splash
and formed into their frothy
patterns, pinned
by north; hot resin crackled, and a cache
of piñon embers quickened in the wind.
To those who desire to read good poetry and are weary of postmodernism, with its vapid and vacuous rubbish that passes for poetry, I strongly recommend Catharine Savage Brosman’s Breakwater.
[Breakwater: Poems, by Catharine Savage Brosman (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press) 111 pp., $30.00]
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