Review: Great Blue, a Turtle Island Ceremony, poems by Neil Flowers, $5.00, WE Press, PO Box 1503 Santa Cruz, CA 95061.

 

Every once in a while I’m sent a poetry book to review that is more than a book of poems, more than a collection, more like an integration. Great Blue is such a book, and it’s a cause for celebration. Neil Flowers reminds us that the reward of writing, adhering to the dictum that underlies all avante-garde work, the proposal by Ezra Pound to “make it new,” is always also a looking back, the older the newer. He begins his poem with a quote from an ethnologist’s study of Eskimo story:

Eskimo narratives shun single perspective, preferring to describe an object from many angels, or to evoke a mood by juxtaposing discontinuous images. The maintain no singleness of tone, no fixed position, but verbally move about, letting the story itself speak, assert its own form unhampered by fixed perspective. —Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities

 

And so it is with Great Blue. Flowers takes us even further back than the Eskimo narrative; he gets to the root of language, at least the poet’s language. He forces our attention on origins, recalling Robert Graves’ remarks about the heron, about the source of poetry:

Mythographic statements which are perfectly reasonable to the few poets who can still think and talk in poetic shorthand seem either non-sensical or childish to nearly all literary scholars. Such statements, I mean, as “Mercury invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes....”

It’s the heron, crane, ibis, the long-beak water waders, honored for their association with fertility and with the increase of nature and the ability, the root of writing, to take messages long distance, away from the sender to someone not present, to make the long distance call a reality. And this is Flowers’ achievement in the big little book. It is big in format, printed on blue tabloid size paper, but the poems are minimal, suggestive, evocative, and filled around with prose, dreams, recollections, stories.

The poem opens with a picture of the heron “Along the levee.” Not too unusual, this is a water bird. But then the picture gets interesting, very. And we can trace the language Flowers is following, like the flight of the bird and its print in the mud: the earth is part of Flowers’ poem as well. Later in the opening poem this line:

(that golden eye swivels on

your dark

secret

Stop for a moment, as you must, for this book demands this constant stopping, reflection, to draw out your own resources. Listen to the greatest of bird watchers, Audubon says of the heron:

When wounded, the Great Blue Heron immediately prepares for defense, and woe to the man or dog who incautiously comes within reach of its powerful bill, for that instant he is sure to receive a severe wound, and the risk is so much the greater that birds of this species commonly aim at the eye.