Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Poets Series, 2021. 88 pages. $18.00.
Jeanette Winterson, in her essay collection Art Objects, reminds readers: poetry “cuts through the noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself.” So it is with Peter Campion’s fourth collection of poems, One Summer Evening at the Falls.
The title—alluding to the “boat stealing” scene in Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850), which captures that poet’s earliest experience with the sublime—signals Campion will confront the overwhelming stature of the natural world at the falls and focus on its shaking internal resonance, all part of his poetic growth and reconciliation with the past. From the titular poem:
I came here wanting my remorse, my coiled-up guilt
and spoiled nostalgia, grief for my former life, to vanish.
And staring at the stone mouth at liquid screens
kaleidoscoping trees and faces—sure the ache subsides
a moment, shrinks to sensory input pulsing through:
white noise of nerves, “the surface of the silent depth.”
With these poems, Campion indeed cuts deeply through “the noise and hurt”: of headset “jabbering” and “mumbles and shouts . . . turned ones and zeros,” of “my own failed marriage story,” and of “this silent language of our searching.” The wound Campion cleans is that of home lost. “And now again, my home no longer what I thought / my home was.” Whether as an adult, or when a child, as in “Greensleeves”:
All bone, blood, passion, marrow feeling
spiraled around me, and whatever “I”
frayed and seared at the core of me was absence.
Campion heals this absence—familial, relational, personal—with new language to fill the “pauses she left,” the “spaces in her sentences.” The result is a collection of exceptional clarity and strength, one that unflinchingly stares at grief and bears it. Campion’s poems recast the conventions of love poetry into language that cuts through contemporary digital noise.
To take this on, Campion reframes the everyday details of life, elevating his subjects into historic and mythic contexts. His collection features: “After Ovid: The House of Rumor,” “After Sappho: The Drill,” “After Horace,” “After Baudelaire: The Cover,” and “After Jin Eun-young: Long Finger Poem.” Throughout, Campion weaves in and through references to Nero, Persius, and Helicon with its muse-spring Hippocrene; Agamemnon and Pegasus; Dante and, of course, Wordsworth. Campion’s poems connect to something greater and beyond the immediate.
This recontextualization requires the poet see the arc of life—families, heartbreak, new love—from a distance while also attending to the specifics. With removed observation and intimate reflection, Campion presents the layered dimensions of painful truths and their larger import, as in “The Lingering”:
The masks of courtesy
growing to both their faces
growing real as the festering
tangle beneath—the tangle’s
still all there’s left to feel
as everyone falls back
to any one other person,
and the house falls back
into its row of houses.
This metaphor of the “tangle”—“the whole, unweeded garden / of our language together”— frustrates Campion’s poetic efforts to reach clarity across the collection, or, as in “Chorus,” to find a static-free signal among:
. . . language also whipping round as if on winds
from outer space: some Thrasher magazine ad copy
or Wordsworth’s “City now doth, like a garment, wear . . .”
Campion sorts various language sources to uncover trusted expressions of the human experience, whether from ancient times, a television, or a cellphone. For more than a decade, Campion has engaged multiple voices in his poems: translations of ancient Roman poetry, snatches of overheard conversations. These patch together life today, among its flood of information streams. Where much of contemporary poetry mimics digital media in a postmodern pastiche, Campion makes meaningful connections from disintegrated contexts. With these poems, Campion continues the explorations of earlier collections, revealing his search for an adequate language of love as the central motive for his heteroglossia.
This is no modest task, and Campion pushes hard against the barriers to doing so throughout the collection. Screens of many kinds serve to create distance, separation, and illusion, which complicate the poetic intimacy he seeks.
We encounter “liquid screens” of waterfalls and their rising mist “illusions”; broadcast screens causing confusion throughout real life with “that electric quiver / through a screen of leaves”; and a “video screen . . . // a clump of bees” teeming with historical narrative. “The screen-slash-wall // shattered to glints” and proves the other side is, in fact, reachable. For the family home, original or recent, there are “some maple trees to screen us from the tracks” and “a window-slice of light,” respectively. Each of these presents defining life moments as something mutable and refracted, unfixed and unfocused. Narrowing the separation these screens create seems longed-for over the life of the speaker: young people trying to connect, “fingers through chain-link.” The “outlandish tease” of lust from Martha, an ice cream shop attendant, out of reach: “the frosted dipping cabinet / she keeps between herself and us three high school boys.”
These aching moments, presented as profoundly personal vulnerability, are universal in their truth. “One Summer Evening at the Falls (II)” reveals both the depth of desire for and complete impossibility of reconnecting with parts of life already gone:
I chant to myself tonight. We’re
kissing through screen doors again,
and all I want to show you’s thisday after day making a life.
A screen door is still a door; its see-through barrier an intentional “tangle.” The connection is nearly close, the memory almost dear. It is the ability to see and, ultimately, hear “the roar // from just the other side of everything, primordial,” the “ambient whir” of some other life, that Campion puts to the page.
The light through these screens, like the dispersed sounds from them, is diffused. Campion’s poems “glimmer” and “glint.” They are lit by “the amber glow of a safelight,” the “shuddering glow” of a commuter train through trees at night. The poems are dappled, “tremoring sunlight” and “moonlight dribbling” across them. In some moments, there is “enchantment / hanging with the elm-branch shadows”; in others, the “Rain / shimmers to vapor.” Campion consistently invites us to do what he makes plain in “She Dreamed a Giant Screen”: “Imagine swimming in an opal: / the primal simmer of shivers all over.”
Campion’s newest collection is “glistening,” like a shoulder blade that appears in one poem. It is a composite, beautiful murmur of a vibrant and intentionally (g)listening poet attuned to the subtlest frequencies. Campion listens to all of life—exterior, interior, mythic, poetic—as one might listen for the music of a waterfall on a summer evening, finding in it the comfort of some monumental, inexhaustible, natural truth. “The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver,” to borrow another phrase from Winterson.
It is here—in these poems—where Campion decides to remain. “Lingering a moment in the crowd / gathered to watch the rush and crash and let the mist / drift upward to our faces, I’m here: the future feels / open again.” Sometimes, life demands the courage to linger, to listen for the poetry inside the noise, and write the sounds of truth. To do so is to hear what finally calls us home.