Book Review: Waxwings by Daniel Nathan Terry
Waxwings
Lethe Press,
2012. Poetry.
Review by Debrah
Lechner
When I first
opened Waxwings by Daniel Nathan
Terry, I found this poem, accusing a moon of ill intent:
Winter
Moon,
Because
you wish it
the
sun sets and the wind lifts
the
wings of weary birds.
You
are the roost in the magnolia’s
thunderhead
of shadows.
You
are why, half-hidden
by
storm-black leaves,
the
birds become silver prey
to
waking owls unless they remain
more
silent than stones
while
they sleep. You are to blame
that
strong men, tucked under
the
roof of night, imagine faces
the
long day helped them forget.
And
it’s your fault
that
they enter a sleep cluttered
with
impossible,
beautiful
reunions.
This deeply-felt
song of protest against a restless night was recognizable to me at once, and
immediately moving. “Pretty good start,” I thought. Every poem in the
collection lived up to this auspicious beginning.
Waxwings draws a portrait of a gay man that spans
childhood, sexual initiation, lovers, coupling, the death of family and spouse,
and meditation on what living will bring in coming years. It does so with
breath-stopping beauty.
Content dealing
with homosexuality in serious literature sometimes is minimized in reviews, the
idea being that this material explores the same universal themes that everyone
encounters and everyone can identify with, and that certainly true of Waxwings. For me, though, and for many
other readers, it is an extra pleasure, and worthy of calling attention to.
In this context,
the portrait of a homeless gay youth in the poem “Since they put you out” is notable:
No
chair receives you,
no
bath invites you,
no
stove pot simmers you
to
supper, no mattress
gives
to cradle you,
no
down rises to fill
the
empty spaces
your
spine leaves behind
in
the back-bending nightmares
you’ve
suffered since
you
got the shove. Since
you
got the boot, no door
thuds
protectively behind you,
no
hallway echoes
without
reminding you,
your
feet fall too much
alone.
Notice, though,
that even for this child for whom a closing door can never again mean the
protection of home, but instead means rejection, alienation, and disposal—even
so, the weight of this loss is back-bending, not back-breaking.
There is
melancholy in these poems, but there is also a strong spine, a will to move on.
There is loss, but there is also love.
When you touch me
you
lay hands
on
the bones of lovers
I
lost long ago.
You
conjure desires
not
entirely
my
own.
When
you stroke
my
thigh, your hand
is
guided by the hands
of
these others—
a
Ouija scrawling
the
answer to the question
that
still roams
the
dark husk
of
our house: love you?
yes,
we love you.
This linkage of
lovers answering their desires is reminiscent of the beautiful imagery in the titles
poem, in which the speaker as a child
observes, in a line of 37 waxwings. The first bird plucks a red berry from a
bush, passing it to the next bird, who passes it to the next bird, and so on.
The first bird returns to retrieve berries and pass them along until all the
birds have been fed, and then the last
bird in line picks a berry to feed the bird that had been harvesting for the
flock.
In a very funny
passage of this poem, the boy thinks about what his world would be like if this
generosity of spirit possessed the kids he goes to school with. They break into
song:
and
dance like fools in an old musical. The camera records it
from
the rafters, all of them holding hands—
Jack
the football star, Shannon the beauty queen.
Ronny
the bully, Todd the unattainable, the distant,
the
secret, the wrong—joined together in a star of arms and legs. . .
Yeah. Let's
leave room for the possibility of that. More of that.
Do not miss this
gorgeous book of poetry.