This Nest, Swift Passerine, Dan Beachy-Quick. Tupelo Press. 72pp, $16.95.
“Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.” — Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Nobody could accuse Dan Beachy-Quick of being anything other than ambitious. A poet who has twice taken on Moby-Dick is one whose courage hardly needs to be questioned, let alone tested. Nevertheless, fresh off last fall’s essay collection, A Whaler’s Dictionary, Beachy-Quick summons another epic task in the opening line of his most recent collection of poems, This Nest, Swift Passerine:
The daily all everywhere disclosed
From this all-encompassing evocation, Beachy-Quick swiftly takes the reader to a locus of convergence: astronomy, the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, meditations on the poetic line, the myth of Echo, technological achievements, Keats’s Grecian urn, the role of the poet in the contemporary world, a directional compass, and countless other seemingly disparate topics converge in this singular book of poetry. To draw them together Beachy-Quick relies on three fundamental openings of perception in the human body—the eyes, the mouth, and the ears:
But how find how as it flew onward
& the mountains gave back the sound
to say what I mean the call of the bird
& the echoe after to say I’ve seen? . . .
The echo after we could see Light in echo the eye sees
also through the ear a double infinity
The italicized sections are material directly quoted from other sources, in this case the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth. These quotations, which reoccur throughout the book, go beyond simple allusion, produced verbatim yet completely removed from their origin, wrapped instead within this work’s own internal narrative. Beachy-Quick simultaneously embraces and escapes the burden of others’ words—but even when he resorts to the poet’s traditional escape to nature, the poetry of a bird’s song overwhelms him. The echo represents not only the birdcalls repeated and answered by other birds but also the poet’s own remembrances of past experiences listening to birds, and even the words of past writers.
As has become typical of Beachy-Quick’s work, these poems exhibit a comfort with the sounds of language. Towers of phonemes are placed one atop the next, meanings intertwined with the visual impression on the page:
to humble my eye I double my
eye note the water strider’s orb
this sphere sings that I must sing
each leg on tense water stands
on each leg to draw its circle just
Each sound is a note of song that creates a beauty beyond the bare meaning of the word, allowing the poems to function on a purely sonic level like the bird songs that recur throughout them.
The choice of passerine in the title fits into both the theme of singing and the self-imposed task of incorporating the infinite: the order Passeriformes, to which it refers, includes over half of all species of birds—most of them songbirds. As with most birds, passerines utilize a different method of vocalization than humans; instead of a vocal cord, the passerine has a syrinx, which creates sound through vibration and an oscillating air supply. This different form of singing informs Beachy-Quick’s obsession with the utterance of sound:
Each one an Echo and Echo myself
Chaos the root in my mouth: silence:
The child’s mouth before a tooth breaks through
And then tongue presses against teeth
And speaks a word:
Born into the order of words
(pointing at a tree the mother says, Tree
(pointing still mother says, Branch
(and still, seeing now what the child sees, Nest)
Nest the word echoes
Through centuries my mouth This Nest
Alive with words not spoken by me
Which I repeat back, repeat back
In the world to make my meaning heard
When Beachy-Quick looks outwards from his self, the poetry, as the verses above show, is powerful, engaging, and provoking. But the Melvillean task of encompassing the whole world necessarily brings with it some failures. When he turns entirely inward, the verse becomes muddled and predictable:
The city buses speed down the avenue as the monarchs sift down to the flowers.
Each one dead from that collision would be one less of the dwindling whole.
I feared for them; I could not turn away.
The attempt to demonstrate a closeness with nature amid the surrounding chaos of civilization generates an unoriginal and unrevealing line. Such moments are rare, however, as the collection almost entirely emanates outward from the poet’s senses and rarely turns explicitly within. As the world is viewed, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted, the reader is given indirect access to the poet’s internal thoughts and emotions, which wash over the reader through the filter of the verse.
In Paterson, William Carlos Williams writes:
. . . unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness . . .
The weight of this task informs the explorations in this collection. The old surrounds the poet, from the Wordsworths to Keats to Ronald Johnson to Tolstoy, but the allusions and songs from the past do not overwhelm Beachy-Quick:
. . . Their throats cool
My throat. I cannot sing their song for you.
Rather, he must and will create his own lyrics. He hears these songs, but he can only sing with his own voice. His address here directly to the reader speaks to the necessity of his writing and vocalization. Not only must Beachy-Quick do it for himself, we as readers need his voice to avoid Williams’s “recurring deadliness.”
Moreover, the poet/narrator experiences the act of creation as a moment of ecstatic knowledge that wipes history clean and leaves only the residues behind, the form of a poem:
Then forgot the words to the clear tone. Then forgot to speak. Then my
blood vibrated with the working of the tree. Then a book was leaves on
water, spread out, so the water couldn’t be seen. Then ecstasy rippled.
Then the stars were on the water. Then I looked up. Then I forgot the
constellations—Orion, Hydra, Dipper, Bear—and only saw the light
piercing through the dark. Then I had no story but this poem.
Beachy-Quick attempts to explore the call of nature and the relationship between it and us as humans. He tests out the theories of his poetic ancestors—the Wordsworthian nature as an opening into the lyric and the past; the transcendentalists’ immersion into nature as a pathway to greater understanding; the Keatsian “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Ultimately, these explorations through other poets, through the surrounding civilization, and through nature lead to the conclusion:
There is the sky / / It is blue / /
Beneath it the good green earth lives / /
I had no other thought. Here I dwell.
For a brief moment clarity is achieved, and the simplicity of the sky and the earth is enough in itself for fulfillment. For a moment the voices of the surrounding songs dissipate and the poet reaches the moment of transcendence. Everything is disclosed, everything is simple within its infiniteness.
Andrew Wessels has lived in Houston, Los Angeles, and Cambridge. He currently is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He also writes A Compulsive Reader.
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