Returning the Kiss of Morning
David Mason, Pacific Light
Red Hen Press, 96pp, $17.95, ISBN 9781636280578
reviewed by Tim Murphy
Excellence in art, Aristotle suggested, is founded on melancholy, and this viewpoint found strong support in the Renaissance and Romantic poetry traditions. ‘Do you not see’, John Keats famously asked, ‘how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?’ The quotation is often invoked by those who argue that suffering and angst are essential for creativity. It may also have informed Anne Carson’s remark that, if prose is a house, poetry is a person on fire running quickly through it. But David Mason, Poet Laureate of Colorado from 2010 to 2014, comes at poetry from a different angle. Instead of burning people running through houses, some of the fuel for Mason’s creativity comes from a sense of displacement regarding ‘houses where my name has been removed, / the habitations I once thought were home’. This is from ‘On the Shelf’, the opening poem in Mason’s seventh poetry collection, Pacific Light; and in the same poem he writes of ‘some words of [his] in an old book’:
There is some melancholy here, but not too much; or at least whatever suffering there is, it is under control. The context of Pacific Light is the poet’s relocation from the United States to Tasmania; this was not a forced migration or displacement but rather the joyful consequence of finding love, albeit initially long-distance love. In ‘Lives of an Immigrant’ Mason explains why he relocated:
Love features in several poems in Pacific Light — ‘To the Other Planets’ suggests that ‘what it means to listen, / really to listen / when another speaks’, may ‘of all things come / closest to love’ — but Mason is aware that migration, whether voluntary or involuntary, can have a dark side. ‘Lives of an Immigrant’ speaks also of how ‘[l]osing a country or giving up on one, / is nothing but another form of death’; and of the Rwandan-Senegalese taxi driver in ‘A Cabbie in America’ who once wished to be a writer, Mason writes:
To counterbalance Mason’s loss of his previous homes, Pacific Light includes several references to the geography of his new one. In ‘Crossing the Line’, the poet observes ‘the Earth online’ and sees, ‘An Andean narrowing to the Land of Fire // and then Terra Australis, the Southern Land / that Europeans took so long to find’; in ‘Antipodes’, a response to the death in 2020 of Irish poet, Derek Mahon, Tasmania’s ‘ghostly gum trees stand . . . like muted ancestors at a loss for words’; and ‘The Air in Tasmania’ opens with the strong emphasis on — indeed celebration of — the natural world that is found throughout the collection:
The collection has a strong reflective sense because many poems are drawn from earlier periods in the poet’s life. ‘Salvaged Lines’, for example, is a poem about the young Mason’s work on a fishing boat that opens with a description of Dutch Harbor in Alaska; and ‘Afternoon Going Nowhere’ is a reverie that considers arms ‘that splashed in the Aegean and the / Tasman Seas’. The Aegean reference is to the times that Mason spent living in Greece, and other poems also have a Greek dimension. ‘The Garden and the Library’ opens with reference to gardeners’ familiarity with the different ways in which different trees die, and then goes on to describe a hospitalized woman’s death and to wonder, in classical Greek fashion, ‘when the immigrant embarked, / now that she was so much like a leaf’. Another poem, ‘Words for Hermes’, speaks of how ‘the god of doorways’ lives ‘in the between’:
Mason is a skilled formal poet, and his natural rhyming capacity is expressed particularly well in poems like ‘Grandmother Song’ and ‘New Zealand Letter’. ‘I’ll go out by the river / and lie down on a stone’, reads the first, ‘where the lizard waits in summer / naked and alone’; while the second pays homage to the ‘young geology’, ‘swelling towns’, and ‘never-far-off sea’ of New Zealand by drawing back to see the earth as ‘the sort of matter that endures / by changing’:
A strong poetic sensibility is combined with a successful conversational style in several insightful accounts of familiar situations, like seeing people in airports that one thinks one knows (‘Long Haul’), the art of learning ‘to do almost nothing’ after an incapacitation (‘Letter to my Right Foot’), and the way a holiday can open one’s eyes to the relative stressfulness of one’s everyday life (‘Barra de Potosi’). The collection’s thematic range renders it unsurprising that Mason is ‘never, / not even by nothing, bored’ (‘Strange Creature That I Am’), while one wishes one could easily follow his advice in ‘A Word’:
This in tune with the tranquility suggested by the book’s title and soulful feel, yet it is plainly advice that only the truly privileged can heed on anything like a regular basis. There is perhaps more universality in the final poem, ‘Note to Self’, which draws some of the book’s themes together by declaring that to be old, ‘and not to feel it is a gift. / To be supplanted and not to care. So be it’. Pacific Light is not an edgy poetry collection borne of existential angst or despair, but it is a well-crafted and accomplished celebration of contentment.
I meant them. The words. Every one of them,
but left them on the shelf to go on living.
There is some melancholy here, but not too much; or at least whatever suffering there is, it is under control. The context of Pacific Light is the poet’s relocation from the United States to Tasmania; this was not a forced migration or displacement but rather the joyful consequence of finding love, albeit initially long-distance love. In ‘Lives of an Immigrant’ Mason explains why he relocated:
[. . .] Not at the point of a gun,
not as a refugee. To cultivate
a new relation to the world, and love,
the simplest of motives, so to leave
was not to lose more than I would lose
by staying still. To choose the given day.
Love features in several poems in Pacific Light — ‘To the Other Planets’ suggests that ‘what it means to listen, / really to listen / when another speaks’, may ‘of all things come / closest to love’ — but Mason is aware that migration, whether voluntary or involuntary, can have a dark side. ‘Lives of an Immigrant’ speaks also of how ‘[l]osing a country or giving up on one, / is nothing but another form of death’; and of the Rwandan-Senegalese taxi driver in ‘A Cabbie in America’ who once wished to be a writer, Mason writes:
It’s not too late, I told him as I paid
and finger-signed his little screen.
But how did I know whether it was late,
or half of what this gentle man had seen?
To counterbalance Mason’s loss of his previous homes, Pacific Light includes several references to the geography of his new one. In ‘Crossing the Line’, the poet observes ‘the Earth online’ and sees, ‘An Andean narrowing to the Land of Fire // and then Terra Australis, the Southern Land / that Europeans took so long to find’; in ‘Antipodes’, a response to the death in 2020 of Irish poet, Derek Mahon, Tasmania’s ‘ghostly gum trees stand . . . like muted ancestors at a loss for words’; and ‘The Air in Tasmania’ opens with the strong emphasis on — indeed celebration of — the natural world that is found throughout the collection:
This green heart, afloat
in Earth’s more-watery half,
bears like everywhere else
its lacerations, but the land
takes flying lessons from the air
and the air’s great cleanser, the sea.
The collection has a strong reflective sense because many poems are drawn from earlier periods in the poet’s life. ‘Salvaged Lines’, for example, is a poem about the young Mason’s work on a fishing boat that opens with a description of Dutch Harbor in Alaska; and ‘Afternoon Going Nowhere’ is a reverie that considers arms ‘that splashed in the Aegean and the / Tasman Seas’. The Aegean reference is to the times that Mason spent living in Greece, and other poems also have a Greek dimension. ‘The Garden and the Library’ opens with reference to gardeners’ familiarity with the different ways in which different trees die, and then goes on to describe a hospitalized woman’s death and to wonder, in classical Greek fashion, ‘when the immigrant embarked, / now that she was so much like a leaf’. Another poem, ‘Words for Hermes’, speaks of how ‘the god of doorways’ lives ‘in the between’:
It’s like a dance, a circle —
turn, counterturn, stand —
but there is no stand. There is no stop,
no still. Not in your world, not in mine.
I’m the conductor god. I escort the dead
to the Underworld. When you receive
their messages, I heard them first.
Mason is a skilled formal poet, and his natural rhyming capacity is expressed particularly well in poems like ‘Grandmother Song’ and ‘New Zealand Letter’. ‘I’ll go out by the river / and lie down on a stone’, reads the first, ‘where the lizard waits in summer / naked and alone’; while the second pays homage to the ‘young geology’, ‘swelling towns’, and ‘never-far-off sea’ of New Zealand by drawing back to see the earth as ‘the sort of matter that endures / by changing’:
Some of its forms we recognize.
Others astonish — the inarticulate
we try to voice before it is too late,
this metamorphic world, tidal and worn,
rooted, adrift, alive, and dying to be born.
A strong poetic sensibility is combined with a successful conversational style in several insightful accounts of familiar situations, like seeing people in airports that one thinks one knows (‘Long Haul’), the art of learning ‘to do almost nothing’ after an incapacitation (‘Letter to my Right Foot’), and the way a holiday can open one’s eyes to the relative stressfulness of one’s everyday life (‘Barra de Potosi’). The collection’s thematic range renders it unsurprising that Mason is ‘never, / not even by nothing, bored’ (‘Strange Creature That I Am’), while one wishes one could easily follow his advice in ‘A Word’:
So take your coffee in the dewy shade,
receive the kiss of morning and return it.
Delay the job, the fretting over money.
This in tune with the tranquility suggested by the book’s title and soulful feel, yet it is plainly advice that only the truly privileged can heed on anything like a regular basis. There is perhaps more universality in the final poem, ‘Note to Self’, which draws some of the book’s themes together by declaring that to be old, ‘and not to feel it is a gift. / To be supplanted and not to care. So be it’. Pacific Light is not an edgy poetry collection borne of existential angst or despair, but it is a well-crafted and accomplished celebration of contentment.