Stray
Adam Houle
Lithic Press, 2017
Adam Houle’s Stray exhibits a technical virtuosity uncommon in a debut collection of poetry. Not only does he demonstrate a mastery of sonnet and couplet, but in poem after poem Houle’s finely wrought lines and exacting syntax “turn their leverage in tight spaces.” The poems in Stray are “checkpoints in the interior,” “scattershot/ into the fractures of fugitive rays” emanating from love, desire, and the difficulties constituted by daily life. Houle constantly revises the rapture upon which he verges, cues up puzzlement, and privileges the “helixed descent” that ends only when ear meets earth. Stray contains loving portraits of a woodworking father and of a studious wife, alongside persona poems from a future timber baron and from a Yellowknife girl. Houle praises equally the lonely bedbug, “tag-a-long armed / with anticoagulant / and an endless gut,” and an armadillo stretching to climb a fence, “a hardback hymnal / opening, taut and self-explained.” Houle’s gift is to present the world in all of its black ice menace, besieged and fissured, yawning against hope, and yet to allow for the consolation that comes in the continued twirl of the Northern Lights, in the last green dance of the day, in the conjugations and declensions mouthed beside a spouse in the dark.
Stray abounds with a Frostian darkness and dread; as in Robert Frost’s best work, Houle’s best poems concern themselves with the interstices between grief and reason. Also, like Frost, Houle is fundamentally a poet of married life. His poem, “A Paper Hive Earns No Quarter,” exemplifies Houle’s commitment to the philosophical and to the connubial in the face of all that is fraught, dumb, and stinging. The poem reads in full:
It’s hell, I think, to see them flit that way
at dusk back to us, swarming our willow
where, limb-perched, they flex in shadows. You pray
they quit us; I pump the poisoned bellows.
Love, things can grow too large for us to love,
so let my labor mean. I’m wreathed in smoke,
an axe-handle clenched in a leather glove.
You cough and gripe. I give the nest a poke
then, cocking back, let loose a full-on swing.
It all explodes. They’re too smoke-drunk to know
it’s me they hate and fail to sink a sting.
The job is done. I clasp the bellows closed.
Look, wife: dazed on your chipped garden gnome
one dumb wasp thinks she drives her stinger home.
Smoking out the wasp nest in this sonnet, like the writing of the sonnet itself, initiates a dialogue with the beloved, and in both tasks meaning accrues through a labor that is meant to contain the expansive, the threatening, the random swarm encroaching from the shadows. Here, as everywhere else in Stray, revelation is shared and gestural, the result of a tandem perspective, a communion earned by callouses on wreckful, busy, rosary-wrapped hands. It is with such hands that one might build a strange and grateful home, a small stanza of light in which to dwell. I have lingered in the light of Stray a long while and I recommend that you do so, too.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.
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