Stephen Sandy, Overlook (LSU Press). Review by Stephen Massimilla
Stephen Sandy’s Overlook is about looking over an extensive terrain without overlooking its subtlest riches. It is the work of a master craftsman assembling and reassembling puzzles—from the rhythmic workings of the New England landscape to the intriguing perplexities of daily life to challenges that crop up at locations throughout the globe. Poems about artists from John Constable to Francis Bacon provide an additional thematic strand, a set of windows through which we can look both inward and out on the world.
The journey is also temporal, as the opening poem “Waxwings” immediately reveals. Yoking contemporary distraction to regional tradition entails artful enjambment when “a dropped cell phone” falls between stanzas to show up “still ringing in a bed of reeds.” Looking up, the poet-naturalist has fallen to the ice, where he observes fallen, wizened winter fruit but still anticipates spring. The narrator concludes: “What can he do back from the stream’s loud bank / but keep his eye on the clouds, carry on.” Both sensitive and tough-minded, the author himself does carry on, eventually concluding this first section of fifteen poems with equally loud calls in “Discovered Country,” where geese converge on Flint’s Pond, gliding “into loud formation, mournful cries.” Yet the speaker tells us that Landsman equates the beauty of such scenes with the silence of God.
Here, as elsewhere, the poet juxtaposes opposites: silence with cries, appreciation with unsettlement, beginnings with endings. The second section of the book opens with “The Inn of the Beginning Bar and Grill,” followed by the poem “Nailed,” which begins with the words “There would be an end to it” and concludes, “well / isn’t any death wrongful in this world of buds”? This at once poignant and clever merging of the poetic and the legalistic is also characteristic of the work.
Confronting mortality and catastrophe, this collection also defines the confluence of the journalistic and the elegiac. Sandy bears witness to sociohistorical suffering in far-flung regions: mudslides, war-torn Ethiopia, trouble in Eastern Europe. Throughout Overlook, he simultaneously confronts the personal wheel of aging. The poem “Wheel” is about recovering one’s footing in on the slow treadmill of time, of doing double time to cover the same ground, yet covering it. As in the conclusion to the first poem in the collection, the dictum remains “carry on.”
The poet’s elegiac strains never overpower his sense of thoughtful commitment to the task at hand. Sandy—who is also a scholar of Romantic poetry—is a master of modern nature poetry, which is also to say, poetry about language. In “The Naming of Birds,” for instance, the speaker wittily explores the extent and limits of a birdwatcher-poet’s powers by contemplating the role of naming in altering—and failing to alter—the natural world.
The New England landscape is clearly home base, but as in Sandy’s Octet and other relatively recent collections, the lookout is vast. We not only travel from Vermont to Minnesota to Montana: We also follow numerous incarnations of the culture hero and the historical figure—from Dante to Coleridge to Lincoln to Henry Adams—to different corners of the globe. What’s more, the journey has a mythic quality.
I was especially taken by such tours-de-force as “As Smoke Robes Fire,” an airy, mysterious lyric series. Here another alienated speaker seeks an elusive homecoming by referencing everything from Aeneas leaving Carthage to a visit to Disneyland in spare, clipped visions and paired-down language that is at times reminiscent of William Carlos Williams. This poem of passage is haunted by the sense of a burdened subaqueous consciousness breaking the linguistic and emotional surface like the “crusted back” of a great female whale. “She feels/ it has not been well for so long,” we are told of this huge ancient mammal seen from the boat, “yet there it goes rising there / in sun, doing his life.” As the book draws to a close, the poems continue to thin down and spread out, revealing the potentialities of, as one title identifies it, “White Space.” Sandy’s both detailed and spacious vista is packed with riches that deepen meaningfully beneath the reader’s gaze. Though the poetry in Overlook is difficult, it is worth looking over, and over again.
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