Review
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First Water : Poems and Prose Poems
Author: Douglas, Colin B.
Publisher: Waking Lion Press
Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2014
Number of pages: 100
Binding: Trade paperback
ISBN10:
ISBN13: 978-1-4341-0380-2
Price: $9.95 [price on Amazon; book has no pre-printed price]
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
This is a marvelous book, and any review of it is overdue. Mine is long overdue.
I have known Douglas for years, and known of his poetry for even longer. This is his first collection of poems, and he’s told me that he had hesitated for years to publish it because he worried that the poems might not be ready. They are. But you should judge that for yourself. Here is “Like a Deer He Comes to Me,” originally published in *Dialogue* 13.4 (1980) as ”Take, Eat”:
Like a Deer He Comes to Me
*Take, eat: this is my body ()*
Like a deer he comes to me,
Parting the ferns,
Like a deer with bright antlers.
I chase him across meadows,
Beside streams I pursue him,
And he does not weary.
But in the thicket he surprises me,
He lets my arrow pierce him.
He gives me of his flesh at evening,
And in the bright morning
Like a deer he comes to me.
The opening line, ”Like a deer he comes to me,” sounds like something out of *The Song of Solomon*. But it isnt; the translators of those poems used hart and hind — the buck and doe of the red deer. By choosing the generic deer, Douglas achieves a vagueness that is exact, and allows the poem to surprise us. He creates a sense of the timeless, a sense of ritual, which the epigraph reinforces. Mormons will know how to read this poem despite its unusual cultural elements, but it need not be considered a Mormon poem. It should be clear to any Christian.
Less clear to the hypothetical Christian reader will be this next poem, because, unlike “Like a Deer He Comes to Me,” it makes use of imagery from the Book of Mormon — a rather surprising but apt use:
Adonai, I Have Sinned
*Ether *
Adonai, I have sinned;
I have sinned grievously against you.
My legs are water, my bowels burn;
My bowels are hot stone.
Silence encloses me like iron walls;
I cannot hear your voice.
I have sinned against you,
And your voice is shut out.
Reach forth your hand to touch me.
As you touched the small stones,
Reach forth to touch me.
Make me clean as burning stone.
I have loved you in time past;
I have embraced your fire.
Embrace me now in my uncleanness.
The range of emotion between the surprise and delight of the first poem above, and the guilt and grief of the second, characterizes fairly well the first part of this collection. These poems, almost all of them published in Mormon journals and anthologies between 1979 and 2006, comprise what I call the exact poems of this book. They show certainty in the face of delight, and joy in the face of shame; they are unblinking in their depiction of both emotions. They invite us as readers to share those feelings. And the exacting nature of the writing, the precision of the vocabulary, make that possible. Those poems comprise the first part of the book, which bears the title “A Certain Tree.”
The echo in that title of a certainty is no accident. Which might lead you to ask, “But where can Douglas go from here? Where do you go from certainty?”
Well, the poems and prose poems of the second section, none of which (according to the acknowledgements) were published prior to their appearance in *First Light, First Water*, are a different mode of discourse entirely. The section is called ”Last Night’s Equations,” and according to the blurb on the back cover, the writings portray people and places found only in dreams, at once delightful and disturbing. To me, the delight is in the discovery of these works, almost all of which I find full of angst, tales of confusion, uncertainty and doubt. Here is one of the poems, one which seems to me to encompass mostly delight. It gives the section its title:
Last Night’s Equations
Last night’s equations are inscribed on the eyes of morning
A woman holds in her teeth the moon
As delicately as Urim balanced on the tip of a salmon’s fin
The moon slips from the woman’s teeth
The eyes of morning take its place
The equations float
White feathers back into the night
The lack of punctuation makes the poem float like those white feathers, a string of images and sounds that function associatively, rather than by logic and systematics, as the earlier poems function. One hardly knows what to make, for example, of Urim in this poem, and it would not help to invoke the word’s specifically Mormon sense. It is as much a mystery in this setting as in its Biblical setting.
This is how the prose poems function as well. Most of them are longer than a page, and would be hard to excerpt. But the first one represents that functioning fairly well (I am going to type it in the lines of text as printed; it may look like verse, but it is prose):
A Long Hallway
A long hallway, old wallpaper, old carpet, musty smell, bare
dim lightbulbs hanging by cords from the ceiling, yellowed
white-painted doors, many doors both sides of the hallway,
the hallway not straight; it curves gradually to the right,
the line of sight cut off in the distance just before the the
lines converge. Whether the hallway makes a circle, that
remains unanswered, but open a door and then another:
behind one a lilac grove, behind another an empty room,
behind another a boulevard by the sea, and one’s greatest
desire, after all, is to lie down by the sea and sleep.
That’s a bleak landscape: the hallway dying, the endless hallway aging and dying, the hallway not a delight, but clearly substantial in the way dreams are. All of Douglas’s trademark precision is in this description, and I’m not even sure that the *the* at the end of the fifth line is a typo. This is a disturbing image precisely because it seems so hopeless, and that last image, of one’s greatest desire, is rather depressing. It’s as if only the sin were in Adonai, I Have Sinned, and the hope had disappeared.
You should by now have a fairly clear picture of the range of Douglas’s work. I urge you to buy the book and devour it. When you finish, you will have earned any heartburn it may give you. And you will be ready for his next book, *Glyphs.*