From The Singing Underneath through Into Daylight, and now to Between Lakes, Jeffrey Harrison has distinguished himself as a poet who preserves the values and traditions that make lyrical and narrative poetry not only accessible, but also transformative. His affinity for tranquil observation generates artful forms that pursue the questions rather than the answers, drawing close to nature and expressing a reverence for simple things. At the same time, his themes are universal, beginning with homages to classical poetry and European art masterpieces housed in museums.
Between Lakes is structured in four sections, coalescing around nature, art and memory. The opening poem, “Ektachrome Days,” is set off from the main body of the book like a preface. Here, the poet summarizes the project of elegizing the past through the color slide, something his generation (and mine) grew up with. It was the medium with which our parents captured the events to be memorialized. He begins:
The way it turned everything blue
even bluer
like the north wind
on days like today
deepening the lake
to cobalt
and bringing fall
a little closer —
an old slide found
in a desk drawer
held up to the light,
moving the past
into the present,
into a day
too blue to last.
The poem, quoted here in full, performs as an overture to a symphony; the entire collection reflects the passage of time as the past moves forward into the future, which insistently becomes present. One hears the suggestion that there actually is no separation between the two — both “the future of the present” and the past are “too blue to last.” Harrison’s opening reflects the transience of beauty within the work of landscape artists, whose efforts to capture a moment both celebrate and mourn their subjects’ inevitable decay.
This leitmotif is even more pronounced in the book’s second poem, “Varnishing Days,” in which the poet exchanges life-into-art for art-into-life. He holds nature up to aesthetics, and it reaches its height when it imitates art, becoming timeless while still partaking in a process of transfiguration. Nature, to be nature, cannot simply conclude itself, since it is in continual process of renewal:
May these days remain unfinished
a while longer, with no artist
jostling his way in
to apply some final flourish
or a coat of varnish that will
only darken. Let the bumblebee
fumble among the blossoms.
It is as if ephemeral temporality, not deathless but continually self-regenerating, is fully accepted. This gesture will become the core of the second and third sections of the book, where Harrison chronicles the passing of his father through childhood memories of places that are comparable to Wordsworth’s “spots of time” in The Prelude. Where Wordsworth created a bildungsroman through chronology moving from childhood to adulthood, Harrison, once confronted with finitude (as his father grows closer to death), employs recollection as a means of showing the “presentness of the past,” embracing “unfinished days” like the unfinished canvas that awaits a preservative varnishing.
The poems that follow in the first section take up art and culture from Paris to San Francisco, where Elizabeth Bishop meets up with Jerry Garcia. In “Sharing a Painting,” Harrison has fun bringing Piero della Francesca’s “Madonna and Child with Two Angels” down to earth by making ancient orthodoxy contemporaneous with cultural icons and whimsical perceptions:
We spoke quietly
when we spoke at all,
as though trying not to discomfort
the Mother and Child, though
they seemed imperturbable,
inhabiting a world apart,
along with the two angels
who stood behind them on either side,
vigilant, looking in different
directions, like (I said)
celestial Secret Service agents …
“Lost Photograph,” a prologue to the middle sections of the book, soberly traces the poet’s path into grief and self-recriminations over lost opportunities to better understand his father, who apparently never tried hard enough to understand him. There is the remorse felt over losing a parent before old wounds could be sutured and healed, leaving emotions left unspoken. He remembers a photograph that his younger brother took of him and his father, who both gave the finger to the camera-wielding younger son just as the shutter snapped. This moment is comparable to recollections of the two brothers helping their father cut firewood, a coming of age ritual that reflected the father’s values of hard work on the land, physicality over intellect, and competition, aspects that later drove a psychological wedge between father and son. At the outset, the speaker is seen searching for a photograph to give weight to a seemingly arbitrary memory:
Maybe some day I’ll open the book
and it will fall out, surprising me once more
in the way it catches my father and me
united in a moment of buffoonery,
our smiles showing through our phony glares.
In this rare moment, Harrison can reflect back and envision his father and himself allied in a way that masks the discomfort. Although he set a precedent in Incomplete Knowledge with a series of poems about his brother’s suicide, Harrison’s unflinching descriptions of his often-troubled relationship with his father are unique to this book. Upon his diagnosis of terminal brain cancer, the father became increasingly meek, dependent on the son he had so often undermined. Their relationship remained fraught with wounded pride and lifelong resentments. For example, in “Shooting a Slingshot With My Father,” Harrison recalls his father setting up a frying pan as “a perfect target / we could shoot at with a slingshot / from the cabin’s porch at cocktail hour / or while he was grilling a steak.” When one of the family members hit the target it would ring out “like a bell over the lake, and echo back.” That echoing works figuratively as the son’s repeating back to the father his own insecurities, which he hid behind a facade of confidence. The poem concludes with a summary of the growing animosity between them, which diminished only in the last year of the father’s life:
It was one competition between us
that never got nasty. And in his last year,
when the tumor had robbed him of his aim
and made him suddenly old, he liked to sit
on the porch and watch me shoot, laughing
with quiet pleasure each time I hit the pan,
as though he were the one making it ring.
This poignant and wistful last line reinforces the porosity of the boundaries between father and son, how readily they dissolve at moments of identification. Mourning requires an inner representation of the deceased by the bereaved, who internalizes aspects associated with the lost object in a process that eventually leads to detachment but can take decades to complete. In part, then, elegy derives from its own acknowledgment of the lost possible futures that haunt the mourner’s mind and may be only partially represented in language.
In section three, Harrison brings the reader through his process of letting his father go in poems that are as tragic as they are disarming. If there was ever a question about autobiography in poetry being overly self-reflective, Harrison’s poems uniquely challenge that assumption, because they are as universally relatable as they are conversational. They reveal communal truths, such as the idea that a lifelong love (and hate) for a parent with whom one has clashed is never vanquished or absolute, given that there is no real end to mourning. Closure never banishes the pain; it works only to repress it. More pertinent to Harrison’s poems, “continuing bonds theory” postulates that even after death, the deceased is educed continually by free-association, whereby one re-makes one’s grief so as not to abandon the loved one. The fear of abandonment haunts Harrison’s poems as they grapple with his idealization of a parent complicated by a need to disparage him.
“Dead Tree” reveals how nature mirrors the deterioration of the body and how the concept of the pathetic fallacy fails to hold up when a mirror is held up to actuality. As the speaker gazes out on the dead tree, he realizes he has forgotten what the tree in its vigor looked like, speaking of the dead metonymically, which is precisely how trauma experts discuss mourning, as “piecemeal,” through fragments of remembrance flooding the mourner’s psyche. Thus, Harrison reveals:
It’s like the way we forget
the dead, slowly,
almost without noticing,
the details of their personalities
falling away
until we have trouble recalling
their gestures, intonations,
humorous remarks,
even the faces
of those we loved,
reducing each of them
often to a single trait. . .
like a jagged stump
enshrouded in ferns
below the absent, once
breathtaking canopy.
The unspoken load of elegy is shouldering the burden of simultaneously regarding the reality that the dead are gone forever alongside the wish for keeping the deceased alive. Harrison is especially efficient at doing this as he moves from caring for his father dying of a brain tumor to a deathwatch as his father approaches death. As the eldest surviving son, Harrison is the one to turn off life support. In “Last Look” he imagines his father’s last reflexes as an indication that he is waking up from his comatose state, then registers the shock of seeing his father die:
We thought we were ready
until the technician removed
the breathing tube —
and he opened his eyes …
… it looked as though
our father had woken up,
not that he was going to sleep
for the last time —
his opaque stare
and thick breathing
a rebuke
I can’t escape.
This is the harsh, gritty truth — the poem elides Harrison’s inborn gift for arousing beauty out of imagery, and metaphorical tropes, favoring instead a harsh and unadorned diction. The speaker could almost believe his father was still there, but is chastened by the medical expert to the fact of his death.
Through a sequence of memory poems about childhood, we learn that the father was overly critical and the son pursued his own interests channeled into academia and pursuits that threatened the father’s masculine pride in being a pragmatic businessman, working the land, and apprenticing his sons to follow. In the poem “Yard Work,” this dynamic is palpable and affecting:
My father owned sixty acres of land
that he worked on every weekend;
whenever I go out to work in my own yard’s
modest plot, I think of him.
Harrison goes on to imagine the father offering advice about how to dig up the mailbox post that the snow plow had knocked over, weighing his own competence against his father’s expectations. With the space under the surface exposed after successfully pulling up the post, Harrison thinks of his father’s ashes placed in a similar space, and he digs dirt out with his hand to make room for the new post. When he says to his wife, who has come out to give advice, “It takes two people for a task like this, / even if one of them is just giving advice,” he suddenly feels “it was his [father’s] voice coming out of my mouth.”
Toward the end of Between Lakes, Harrison returns to the elegiac tradition that frames the book. In poems full of candor, the poet revivifies both his father and brother, especially through those “spots of time” that are suspended in the speaker’s unconscious. In “Rocking Chair,” the empty rocking chair is imbued with the absent presence of the father, now observed as rocking “on its own, / unoccupied / back // and forth / on the bleached/boards,” and with that point of departure the scene widens with its insistent rocking motion. This in turn evokes his father’s ghost as an invisible force that propels the wind, giving it the impression of someone “sitting there/back // from the dead / for an after- / noon, // staying only until / the wind itself/ dies.” This is the paradoxical crucible of grief — the dead never die, as they never finish dying.
“Among Flowering Milkweed” is an example of this progression:
What drew us first to the stand of roadside milkweed
was its fragrance pollinating the early dusk,
so sweet we wanted to breathe it in, make it part
of ourselves, and almost thought, as we approached,
that we could hear as well as smell it — a faint,
low whir — before we made out in the dimming light
what we took at first for a swarm of hummingbirds
probing the rosy globes …
These lines resonate with Keats’ axiom, “O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts!” a directive for the poet to regard their intuitions of the imagination and its celestial reflection as being of equal importance to human life and spirituality. Harrison’s poems work to capture that rapture, while stalking the truth and delivering it with candor and grace.
[Published by Four Way Books on September 8, 2020, 150 pages, $16.95 paperback]