[Terese Coe]

This review was also published years ago, but I realized recently it might not have been posted here either. And it wasn't, at least not in this thread. It was published in Orbis (UK) in late 2005 or early 2006. This is the original review, about 500 or 600 words longer than Orbis' usual reviews, and Nessa O'Mahony edited it as she liked, which looked great to me.

Review of David Mason’s Arrivals

Published by Story Line Press 2004; ISBN # 1-58654-036-X

David Mason is a man poised between the reflectiveness of full maturity, the curiosity and compulsion of young manhood, and the sagacity of childhood. He retains much of the wonder natural to a wise child, especially in his meditations on landscapes. The depth and breadth of his perspective, his lucidity of expression and longing are suffused with past, present, and future time, visits decades old and visits to come. The geography of his new collection of poems, Arrivals, encompasses the Midwest and the West, India, New Zealand, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and other locales unidentified but palpable.

In his poems of Greece, in particular, thousands of years dissolve into nonexistence; only the stupefyingly hard physical environment throws him into rapture, the rapture of sheer presence:

We had walked a whole day on high ridges
somewhere between the heat-struck sea and peaks,
each breath a desert in a traveler’s lungs,
salt-stung, dusty, like summer’s rasping grass
and the roughness of stone. Biblical thorns
penned us, while the stunted ilex trees
shadowed the path. It seemed from these dour fields
we could not emerge on anything like a road.

—from “Agnostos Topos”


I stiffly climbed the gate (now chained and locked)
and walked the point of land and knew each tree—
nothing but private memories, after all.
It wasn’t the loss of time or friends that moved me
But the small survivals I was here to mark.

—from “Kalamitsi”

He is at once the restless stranger driven to gypsy tramping by who-knows-what past events and the ingenuous philosopher given to insight. Does it sadden the poet that “None lives who can name the dead of that place/ with its raided passage aimed at Ailsa Craig”? Those lines from “The Chambered Cairn” are more accepting, however, and far less restless than the following, in which he speaks to himself at the end of “Mumbai”:

Mason, you’ve come to the other side of the world—
Why can’t you lose yourself on Nehru Road?

I’m tempted to answer that Mumbai could be a dangerous place in which to attempt to lose oneself. As he says in the first line of that poem, “The crowd’s no apparition on Nehru Road.” No, not at all! And the fact he states that tells us more about his state of mind, of course, than about Nehru Road.

Unfathomable but compelling restlessness and sweetly jaded age are two ever-present poles in Mason’s sun-filled topography. He opens “In Transit” with:

The urge to settle never stays for long,
nor does desire to move like a windblown seed
when days have no more purpose than a song
at midnight, drifting from the olive trees,
or books you packed but cannot seem to read.
The passing stranger is well-known in Greece.

Two stanzas later, he reveals: “But the only Eden that could ever claim /you wholly disappeared beneath the waves.”

This reader would have liked to know more about “the only Eden.” What was it: a lover, a civilization, a coral reef, a time gone by? He ends “In Transit” with “You are as happy as you’ll ever be.” Ambivalent, ambiguous, indistinct, suffused with recurring and wretched loneliness: all travelers have felt this “in transit.” Indeed, accessing that loneliness is one of the more edifying reasons for travel, certainly for the artist. Travel is a study in the self.

As Mason notes in his magnificent extended meditation on “Aoteroa, land of the white cloud” in “New Zealand Letter,” “the inarticulate/ we try to voice before it is too late.” In this poem, however, his quondam loneliness is nowhere to be found; small wonder, as he is traveling with his wife. Thus his candidness about mood and attention is a revealing and accurate gauge, perhaps, and the reader is privy not only to a place but to an intimacy of perception and comprehension all too rare today.

“The Dream of Arrival” moves into rhymed tetrameter after a number of blank verse poems, and its authenticity, charm and lyricism enhance the tale of Odysseus’ rather bleak but emotion-filled arrival on the shores of Ithaca.

W.S. Merwin believes David Mason’s work is a kind of “American Pastoral.” This is true of much of his work, but his 33-stanza dramatic narrative, “The Collector’s Tale,” strays far from that genre. Gothic and haunting, in the diction of the youthful but desolate Midwest, it is an invented and highly compelling folk tale in iambic pentameter, with gentle slant rhymes that impel the narrative forward. The story somewhat recalls that of David Mamet’s brilliant play, American Buffalo: the secondhand/junk shop setting, the slow suspense of confrontation with the outsider/drunk, the desperation for survival or materiality, and finally the grotesque and the violent.


I knew the man. We dealers somehow sense
who we trust and who the characters are.
I looked at my inebriated guest
and saw the fool-as-warrior on a quest
for the authentic, final recompense
that would rub out, in endless, private war,
all but his own image of the best.

…

Maybe I was shouting, I don’t know.
I heard him shouting at my back, and then
he came around between me and the case,
a little twisted guy with yellow teeth
telling me he’d call the fucking cops.
I found the jawbone of that buffalo.
I mean I must have picked it up somewhere,

maybe to break the lock, but I swung hard
and hit that old fucker upside the head
and he went down so easy I was shocked.

—from “The Collector’s Tale”

The italicized lines indicate Foley’s speech; Foley is the unwelcome drunk who collects Native American artifacts and comes to the narrator’s home with a tale so unnerving and authentic that it bleeds where you read.

Mason’s dramatic poem reflects more on the history of racism in America than does Mamet’s play, and it is the masterpiece in Arrivals. Moreover, it establishes David Mason as a preeminent poet of American narrative in the formalist tradition. It boasts sweep and mystery, hypnotic if tawdry life and ghastly death, time past and future, a dead eye for reality and a very live ear for natural diction. It is a tale to be brooded over, but even then will remain elusive—despite its uncanny depth of characterization and an ideological subtext that owes much to the Civil Rights movement. There one may find other notes suffused with the indelible 60s as well. “The Collector’s Tale” is Americana at its most brutal, passionate, and grotesque.

This is David Mason’s third collection of poems. His first, The Buried Houses, was co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and his second, The Country I Remember, won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. He may not have emerged “on anything like a road,” as he says, but his “small survivals” are victories of empathy, reflectiveness, and an imagination that reaches effortlessly into the collective unconscious.

--Terese Coe