Review
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Title: Glyphs, With Poems New and Revised
Author: Colin B. Douglas
Publisher: Waking Lion Press
Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2015
Number of pages: 137
Binding: Trade Paperback
ISBN10: 1434103900
ISBN13: 978-1-4341-0390-1
Price: $12.95 (price from Amazon; no price printed on book)
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
I recently reviewed Colin B. Douglas’s first volume of poems, *First Light, First Water*, for the Association. *Glyphs*, Douglas’s second volume, has the subtitle *With Poems New and Revised*. The revised poems are ones originally published in *First Light, First Water*, and the revisions do not affect my conclusions about that volume. It is worth reading in its unrevised version. I commend it to your attention.
But for this review, I will focus on what Douglas calls his surrealistic poems, which are mostly new to this collection. They are the logical outgrowth of his experiments with prose poems in *First Light, First Water* — all of which are reprinted, many with revisions, in *Glyphs*. And they are in verse, not prose — in verse lines determined by the phrase, clause or image at hand.
Douglas, in his Author’s Note, talks about a division in this book similar to that in the first. Most of my likely readers he says, will find the poems in the first part of this collection, approximately through Outside the Longhouse, to be readily accessible. Before considering his next sentences, I want to present that poem for your consideration:
Outside the Longhouse
Early light through low clouds
Beach at low tide
Canoes drawn up
Smell of alder smoke
My woman still wrapped in a bear skin
Last night I dreamed Raven stole our fire
The first four lines are indeed accessible, because of his precision in the use of language — imagist in their clarity. Ezra Pound would be proud. The fifth line, however, introduces an element of mystery for me, because, assuming that still indicates the speakers former place, wrapped in a bear skin beside his woman, perhaps the same bearskin, I immediately wonder Why are they sleeping outside the longhouse? Was there no room for them in the inn?
This minor mystery deepens, however, with the last line. But before I pursue that, let me say that Douglas comes by this imagery honestly: he is an enrolled member of the Samish Indian Nation according to the Biographical Note, and this scene perfectly befits that nation (the connection is through his father.) And in many of the new poems in *Glyphs* (and this is one), he draws on his curiosity about that connection, and his experiences as a young man learning of the connection, to seek to understand his poems.
The line Last night I dreamed Raven stole our fire fits fairly well into the distinction Douglas makes in his Authors Note between his readily accessible poems and those in the latter part of the book [which] may seem puzzling and strange — ‘surrealistic,’ though I am not a Surrealist. He goes on to say that More can be said about the nature of these oneiric poems — that is, poems partaking of the nature of dreams — (which is what I prefer they be called), but to say it with anything approaching completeness requires far more philosophical and theological verbiage than space available here permits. Because of that, Douglas has begun contributing to the AML blog *Dawning of a Brighter Day* a series of posts entitled Being a Restorationist Writer, and the Quest for the Infinite (now in its seventh installment). Full disclosure: I helped him start that blog, by proposing that he write down the theory pouring out of his head; I then proposed the posting to the blog-meister, so I have a fairly clear idea of how Douglas approaches the task of being complete in his philosophical and theological verbiage.
And there is yet one more factor in this equation, one he identifies: poems of this kind can be merest glimpses through a window on the infinite and eternal and marvelous and rationally, literally unspeakable mystery of being … of utter freedom — agency — of Being; of the erotic and convulsively beautiful ecstasy of Eternal Life and Creation.
So, Outside the Longhouse partakes of both the accessible and the oneiric, and includes the erotic in its mystifying last lines. Raven we know; but why is he stealing the fire? I, for one, am excluded from this world. Knowing that, go back and read the poem again: what seemed a slight bagatelle should have more freight, and have surrendered none of its grace.
The same could be said of one of the prose poems, which was not revised with its republication in *Glyphs*. Take a look at this (typed in at something like its lineation on the page):
There Were Several Reasons Why This Wouldn’t Work
There were several reasons why this wouldn’t work. For one, the road
extended indefinitely beyond the horizon, down a narrow hallway
papered in yellow and hung with the ivory arms of lost infants. For
another, a mirror hung in the air in innumerable particles of glitter-
ing dust, remembering vaguely its old place on the wall of a small
house in woods, or peering out from among the clotted roots of
cedars and spruces. I have tried to explain this, but you know how
it was: money was scarce, the weather uncertain, the smell of the
spruces under the hot sun heavy in the air. Then the children came,
a procession of them, so many, shuffling silently along the yellow
corridor, eyes wide and soft and sad, thinking of earlier days when
they conversed freely with deer whose antlers were bright with rain.
We lay on our bed, propped on our elbows, watching them, hardly
conscious of our nakedness, remembering light on ancient seas.
All of the elements Douglas discussed in his Authors Note are present in this prose poem; but the most striking image, a mirror hung in the air in innumerable particles of glittering dust, shows that Douglas is *describing* the elements he sees in his experiments, rather than being guided in his writing by the abstract ideas of the oneiric schema he embraces. His analysis, like mine, is ex post facto.
I love classical music. One of my favorite pieces is the 3rd Symphony of Jean Sibelius, and I love it partly because of the intense magical opening movement, which begins as if it could be a cello concerto, with cellos joined by double basses in an urgent, uptempo, almost running, figure. It resolves itself into a symphony only as the first minutes fade, and the entire orchestra picks up the themes and melody of the opening. I especially love the performance by the Utah Symphony conducted by Maurice Abravanel, because it sings, rather that chants, those opening melodies.
I find that same kind of magic in the most involving of Douglas’s oneiric poems.
Here is one of them, displaying his characteristic concerns with language, the natural world, and elements of the erotic:
Looking Down a Narrow Valley
Looking down a narrow valley where a river runs straight
Both sides heavily wooded with fir and spruce
A notch of clear sky in the distance where the river drops over the horizon
Hanging in the notch against the blue sky
An enormous boulder of weathered limestone
Carved with letters of a language I do not know
They are scripture of a vanished race
I touch the carvings with my finger tips
Tiny grooves
A long step from the top of the boulder to the left ridge of the canyon
But the air among the trees is sweet
The odor of fir and spruce needles warmed by the sun
The vision of the unknown alphabet is clear in the memory
As I sit cross-legged in the mouth of a cave
Behind me in hooded robes, some of blue and some of red
Are the members of a band of itinerant scholars
Or perhaps they are workmen, or jugglers
They are very small
Letters of the unknown alphabet scratched into the walls of the cave
On the ceiling and the walls
And a drawing of an unknown animal
An animal with long legs and a hornless head
It speaks slowly but its words cannot be made out
The girls who attend it are gowned in diaphanous gauze
That would catch fire if exposed to the sun
One of them points at letters on the wall
And gazes back expectantly, as if waiting for a response
But in the distance the river flashing in code demands attention
The small men in red and blue are dispersed among the trees
Birches have grown up among the firs
Smooth pebbles exude from small holes in the bark
And slide in orderly streams down the trunks
Pebbles red and blue
A letter carved on each of them
The boulder fragments as if from within
The pieces move apart slowly
Blue sky appears between them,
They cease to move
The cluster holds its position
The girls approach from behind
Careful to remain in shade
The key to the unknown language is kept in a box
At the back of the cave
One of the girls sits on it
The other moves a finger on the wall, writing
This combines images from the canyon country of Utah and the surrounding states, especially of the ruins of the Anasazi, with a setting not out of place in the Pacific Northwest — and includes elements of our race’s earliest experiments with art. The most striking image, for me, is the diaphanous gauze That would catch fire if exposed to the sun — and it would fit in any of those settings. But this is a poem in which the imagery, proceeding with all the clarity, logic and irrationality of a dream, is wedded to the intense sense of frustration at not being able to read what is written, to hear what is spoken. The dreamer exists in someone else’s world, with no key available. Imagine that you are a Syrian refugee in Germany, when your second language is English, and you are trying to fit in.
Or imagine another situation in which you are entertaining this dream.
The elements of the dream are all consistent with Douglas’s other poems on the subjects, and yet form a coherent whole without relying on either him or us to know a system of interpretation. That is one of the things that overwhelms me as a reader. The poems do not mean, but be — a state that allows me to inhabit them like the speaker inhabiting that cave, trying to find the key to that unknown language.
I urge you to not only read, but buy — to not only buy, but read — *Glyphs*.