{"id":1015,"date":"2015-05-23T23:30:48","date_gmt":"2015-05-23T23:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/?p=1015"},"modified":"2015-05-23T23:30:48","modified_gmt":"2015-05-23T23:30:48","slug":"an-overview-of-stephen-sandys-overlook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/an-overview-of-stephen-sandys-overlook\/","title":{"rendered":"An Overview of Stephen Sandy’s Overlook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Sandy,\u00a0Overlook <\/em><\/em>(LSU Press). Review by Stephen Massimilla<\/p>\n

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Stephen Sandy\u2019s\u00a0Overlook<\/em>\u00a0is about looking over an extensive terrain without overlooking its subtlest riches. It is the work of a master craftsman assembling and reassembling puzzles\u2014from 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.<\/p>\n

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The journey is also temporal, as the opening poem \u201cWaxwings\u201d immediately reveals. Yoking contemporary distraction to regional tradition entails artful enjambment when \u201ca dropped cell phone\u201d falls between stanzas to show up \u201cstill ringing in a bed of reeds.\u201d Looking up, the poet-naturalist has fallen to the ice, where he observes fallen, wizened winter fruit but still anticipates spring. The narrator concludes: \u201cWhat can he do back from the stream\u2019s loud bank \/ but keep his eye on the clouds, carry on.\u201d Both sensitive and tough-minded, the author himself does carry on, eventually concluding this first section of fifteen poems with equally loud calls in \u201cDiscovered Country,\u201d where geese converge on Flint\u2019s Pond, gliding \u201cinto loud formation, mournful cries.\u201d Yet the speaker tells us that Landsman equates the beauty of such scenes with the silence of God.<\/p>\n

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Here, as elsewhere, the poet juxtaposes opposites: silence with cries, appreciation with unsettlement, beginnings with endings. The second section of the book opens with \u201cThe Inn of the Beginning Bar and Grill,\u201d followed by the poem \u201cNailed,\u201d which begins with the words \u201cThere would be an end to it\u201d and concludes, \u201cwell \/ isn\u2019t any death wrongful in this world of buds\u201d? This at once poignant and clever merging of the poetic and the legalistic is also characteristic of the work.<\/p>\n

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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<\/em>, he simultaneously confronts the personal wheel of aging. The poem \u201cWheel\u201d is about recovering one\u2019s footing in on the slow treadmill of time, of doing double time to cover the same ground,\u00a0yet<\/em>\u00a0covering it. As in the conclusion to the first poem in the collection, the dictum remains \u201ccarry on.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The poet\u2019s elegiac strains never overpower his sense of thoughtful commitment to the task at hand. Sandy\u2014who is also a scholar of Romantic poetry\u2014is a master of modern nature poetry, which is also to say, poetry about language. In \u201cThe Naming of Birds,\u201d for instance, the speaker wittily explores the extent and limits of a birdwatcher-poet\u2019s powers by contemplating the role of naming in altering\u2014and failing to alter\u2014the natural world.<\/p>\n

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The New England landscape is clearly home base, but as in Sandy\u2019s Octet <\/em>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\u2014from Dante to Coleridge to Lincoln to Henry Adams\u2014to different corners of the globe. What\u2019s more, the journey has a mythic quality.<\/p>\n

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I was especially taken by such tours-de-force as \u201cAs Smoke Robes Fire,\u201d 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 \u201ccrusted back\u201d of a great female whale. \u201cShe feels\/ it has not been well for so long,\u201d we are told of this huge ancient mammal seen from the boat, \u201cyet there it goes rising there \/ in sun, doing his life.\u201d 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, \u201cWhite Space.\u201d Sandy\u2019s both detailed and spacious vista is packed with riches that deepen meaningfully beneath the reader\u2019s gaze. Though the poetry in\u00a0Overlook<\/em>\u00a0is difficult, it is worth looking over, and over again.<\/p>\n

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Stephen Sandy,\u00a0Overlook (LSU Press). Review by Stephen Massimilla   Stephen Sandy\u2019s\u00a0Overlook\u00a0is about looking over an extensive terrain without overlooking its subtlest riches. It is the work of a master craftsman assembling and reassembling puzzles\u2014from the rhythmic workings of the New England landscape to the intriguing perplexities of daily life to challenges that crop up at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1015"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1017,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015\/revisions\/1017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}