19/07/2024
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=950145630456166&set=a.482774483859952 REVIEW of ALL BEAUTIFUL THINGS NEED NOT FLY by Martin Willitts Jr.
Title: All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly
Author: Martin Willitts Jr.
Publisher: Silver Bow Publishing
Cover Art: “The Love Birds” painting by Candice James
Layout/Design/Editing: Candice James
ISBN: 978-1-77403- 299-2 paperback
ISBN: 978-1-77403- 300-5 e- book
Reviewed by: Greg Stidham
All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly is an ambitious collection of poems by Martin Willitts, Jr., comprising fifty-four poems organized into four sections. The complexity of the collection becomes apparent only as one probes deeper and deeper into it, complexity not implying abstruseness, but rather complexity like the multiple overtones of a rich, complex wine.
The four sections of the book stand apart from each other by somewhat differentiating characteristics. The first section consists of poems that are on the short side, none more than one page in length. They tend to be stand-alone poems of startling lucid images. Though there is no real motif the poems share, it becomes quickly obvious that there is a vibrant relationship between the poet and the natural world, be it insects, birds, horses. That relationship is almost symbiotic, in that the poet gives the naturalistic images life, as they give life back to the poet and his poems.
In “Work Horse” we are transported to an Amish landscape through the actions of the stately horses. The horses are romanticized until a tension is introduced at the end, with the horses figuratively calling out the romantic falsehoods of the poem. This kind of tension is seen in many of Willitts’ poems in this collection.
“Four Blue Horses” is an ekphrastic poem inspired by a painting by Franz Marc. The reader does not need to see a copy of the painting; the poem paints its own perfect picture. Tension reappears in “Searching for What We Never Find,” a poem whose simplicity brings to mind William Carlos Williams but does not hide from mystery. The poem concludes with the unsettling image of a “ricocheting bird” trying to escape the inside of a white clapboard house through a closed window.
“Burying Beetle” continues the use of tension, beginning with the image of a black beetle emerging from the carcass of a dead bird. This prompts a short musing on the synonymous nature of life and death, questions about the role of God, and finally humans doing what we do best–to question–while the burying beetle does what it does best.
Finally, three more poems from the first section merit mention. “Transitioning” salutes the butterfly, whose life is but one season; but the poem also hints at the impermanence of language or poetry: “words ebb out into night/ purpling the sky.”
“Shooting the Last Female White Giraffe” is a straightforward elegy for all that is being lost on this planet whose destruction we have nearly completed. The last poem in the section, “On a Walk” is a simple, four-line poem very reminiscent of the style of Ted Kooser. There are many more elegant poems in this section, too many to discuss within the constraints of a brief review.
The poems in Section II seem to gravitate toward the more personal, without losing connection to the world of nature. The first poem in this section is titled “Loggerhead Shriek,” which I take to be a play on words for the small bird, the loggerhead shrike, whose call sometimes sounds like a shriek. The bird is fierce and aggressive, not only toward prey, but to other birds and even birds of its own species. The poem itself is the reading of a nightmare:
You bring appointments of death,/ bits of gnashes, edible chunks flaying, /blood in the beak of a moon.//We call you butcherbird, / you bring bereavement./ You are deceptive; small as a robin, / but blood-thirsty, savage, offering finality.
The shrike is a deceptive, quaint appearing bird, belying its ferocious nature which becomes the nightmarish quality of the poem, and perhaps even a warning to others (humans?) to be wary of such subterfuge.
“Crickets” is unapologetic for being more positive. As a gardener plants ferns, he becomes reawakened to the sound of crickets.
It takes a while for recognition to plant itself,/ a secret we almost missed./ A cricket sings thanks/.
And after all, isn’t it what this is really all about? / This singing life, this tremble of heart and heat,/
chants of simple pleasures. These sublime desires, / hiding in greenness with incredibly grateful singing.
In “A Brief Encounter” a grasshopper alights in the palm of the poets hand, and begins to explore, unhurried, as the poet also explores the relationship between the grasshopper and himself, concluding,
For a moment, stillness lasts forever./ This world touches me. //I don’t need a church to understand
what a complex world this can be,/ or how the urge to kneel in the presence of light / pulls its invisible rope, dragging me,/ kicking and screaming, or gently.
Section II seems at least in part to be musings about impermanence of an existential sort. But the concluding poem, “The Elephants Sing About Everlasting Love,” seems to offer hope. It begins with lament for the hardships elephants endure in our modern world. But it concludes with
We are blessed.// The dirt we toss on our backs / is blessed. The savanna and the shrub trees / providing leaves to eat are blessed. The sun/ watching over us is blessed. / The water we drink with blessedness / sprays over us to consecrate ourselves / in the survey of all that we see. A water / contains the spirit of every song ever sung, /every refrain wanting to be shared.
The third section of the collection dives even more deeply into the personal. In “Message” Willitts seems to be pondering his own mortality, still couched in terms of the natural world. In “Why the Cicadas Are Noisy,” we are introduced to someone who appears to be the poet’s sister, who seemingly has a mental illness of some sort, a notion mostly suggested by Willitts’ deft handling of images and metaphor until it is made more explicit:
My sister asks what’s the purpose of living? / Hesitation marks on your wrist mark off attempts, / trails no one can follow to rescue her.// Cicadas wait for Emergence. /
Her husband has hidden the knives.
This poem is extraordinary and especially “successful” because of the pain it evokes in the reader.
The most surprising poem in this section is “The Drowning of Whales,” a lengthy poem divided into thirteen parts. The unwatchable death of beached whales is described in poetic detail that is heartbreaking, but it is also a warning to us humans:
Some people have seen other people suffer/ and do nothing, seen people shot or watched hunger, / never lifting a finger to do anything. / Whale-calling clings to us with dampest fog.
This is a poem that will cling to the reader for a long while.
“Sky Writing” begins with a pastoral portrait of a “gust” of sparrows rustling trees as they launch into flight, never finishing what they intend to do. That pastoral portrait seems to morph into a lament about even the impermanence of words, or (dare I say) of poetry as the birds
writing, again / and again, / and / again, // temporary messages.
The last poem is a lengthy, twenty-four part epic narrative of the poet’s mother’s prolonged struggle with slowly progressing dementia, a poem that is at once difficult to read and moving beyond expectation.
The fourth and last section of the collection is the most challenging. It consists of two lengthy poems. The first is titled, “It Is All Written in Celtic Words,” in which Willitts borrows from the ancient Druid calendar which comprises thirteen months. Its astrological signs are all animals, and in the thirteen parts Willitts describes the traits of each of these quasi-mythological animals, and the thought that he is describing each animal as a feature of his own persona is inescapable.
The second poem of the final section, “Our Hearts Are Weighed When We Are Born,” is similar to the first. This time the poet is borrowing from the ancient Egyptian calendar, and once again, the gods who are the characters of this zodiac seem to be parts of the poet himself.
I found it challenging to write a review of this collection which does it justice. The more deeply one reads, the more obvious the complexity of the collection becomes. There is much more contained in it than I could begin to reference. I will conclude by offering it to you in all its complexity, its overtones of whim, of sadness, of questioning and uncertainty. Pay note to the bouquet, then sip slowly, savoring each component of its delicious palate.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Greg Stidham is a retired pediatric intensivist (ICU physician) currently living in Kingston, Ontario, with his wife Pam and two “canine kids,” the most recent iteration of an ever-evolving pack of rescue dogs. Greg's passion for medicine has yielded in retirement to his other lifelong passions—literature and creative writing. He has published numerous poems in a variety of literary journals, several short stories, a memoir “Blessings and Sudden Intimacies”, (PathBinder Publishers, 2021), a collection of short stories "Dear Friends”, (PathBinder Publishers, 2021), and a poetry chapbook “Doctoring in Nicaragua”, (Finishing Line Press, 2021), “Iced Tea Poetry” (Silver Bow Publishing 2023), “Propolis For a Fractured World” (Silver Bow Publishing 2024)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Martin Willitts Jr is an editor of Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Harvest Time” (Deerbrook Editions, 2021); “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022); “Not Only the Extraordinary are Exiting the Dream World (Flowstone Press, 2022); “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); and “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023). His forthcoming is “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024).
