“When they wrote the Constitution, I was left out,” Barbara Jordan, an African-American Congresswoman from Texas, said during a Watergate hearing in 1974. Her intent, with deep, slow cadences, and the ‘I’ banked by longer pauses than most in her speech, had, for one young listener, the intended effect. It was burned into me how tragically wrong the Constitution I knew to be flawed, incomplete, was.
The canonical representation of American letters is, like the Constitution, both a carved tablet for the ages and a work in progress. The carved tablet aspect sometimes requires enormous effort to undo neglect that in the instance of Native American literature, amounts to cultural immorality. For almost forty years, Heyday Books has served as a corrective to what comprises genuine American literature , and the press does not sacrifice quality on the altar of political inclusion.
Heyday’s Releasing the Days by Stephen Meadows is a small, attractively designed book filled with beautiful, straightforward poems that feel so perfectly connected to the intent of the author’s spirit that it is easy to consider inserting most of them into any formal religious ceremony. Non-believers can also be nourished by chanting or reciting them, acting on the universal need to praise and mourn.
“Waterhole ” in its entirety is :
A reedy place full
of grasses
and tules
fronded
toad colored
by the bay’s
curved edge
ancestors
accustomed to moist
pliant ground
came down
the long swale
for their water
a day at a time
stepping soft
in the wet mud
knowing
they would slip
just a little.
There is multifaceted wisdom in every word and space. “Stepping soft” instead of “softly,” provides room in the throat to elongate the sound, bringing the foot of the walker and the end of the line into tonal balance. Turning “frond” into “fronded” activates the whole poem, giving it an edge that is necessary to keep the composition upright—literally and imaginatively. It is all so well done, it seems almost a desecration to highlight, because a gift this fine deserves apprehension with all senses open before intellect kicks in. In Releasing the Days we’ve got fifty-plus more pages of such material. It’s the kind of book that makes a reviewer want to sing incoherent doxologies highlighting a handsome sky, while sitting in an especially pretty park, eyes and heart going back and forth between page and heaven.
Meadows has a lot more on his mind though, than a walk in the landscape, as “In the Final Hours” so persuasively declaims :
You were killed
in the final hours
of the war
to end wars.
As you bled
in the wire
you thought of your mother
your brother
you thought of the farm
the lush fields lovely
in the twilight
dew dampened
full of corn.
There in the mud
you were so young
you left us no new poems
you left us no remnant
no girl at home crying
not even the simple
sad eloquence of dawn
at your dying.
The negatives add up, with a mournful melodic “eloquence” of their own.
It makes logical and emotional sense that readers will not learn here whether Harold Meadows, to whom the piece is dedicated, was a great-uncle, a distant cousin, or someone who shared a last name without being a blood relation. The lack of air in the last lines, contrasted with earlier nods to farm life, and the opener that the death took place almost at the end of a bloody conflict, work as a kind of bold-faced reminder of the tragic tension all soldiers at war experience. It is unclear how old Meadows was when he wrote this poem, but this paragraph seems the right place to mention that he was once a cadet at West Point.
The range of emotion in this slim volume is one of its many pleasures and satisfactions. Recalling putting a child to bed is the kind of subject that can lead to sticky syrup. Meadows skips the pitfall , delivering a piece a child will enjoy reading well into adulthood. The poem I’m discussing is called “Bedtime Story,” and it’s as fine as “St. Judy’s Comet,” a classic penned and sung by Paul Simon in the 1970’s :
When I put you to bed
little boy
it is never without knowing
that you will not always be
a little boy
and when you’re sleeping
and I kiss you
there in your dreams
a part of me
wants it all to stay
right here
your incremental breathing
and my wonder
and this bedroom
full of moon.
The well-loved object of this poem, and any reader who encounters its words, will want to own it for a very long time.
“Above the American River” is one of many reminders, each equally welcome, that for Meadows, landscape and human incursion have relationships that need to be named in their specifics, much like the work of C. S. Giscombe and Rebecca Solnit, The title serves as a first sentence, taking us
On a red dirt road
climbing the grade
into pines
Cloud on the ridges
in the higher Sierra
Below in the black oak
a cold twist
of the river
Sun and slow shadow
snake and rock silence
the stark slanted peace
of the canyon.
I read this for pleasure but also with an awareness of potential flubs. He doesn’t say “slow-moving shadow,” because that’s trite, and by saying “slow shadow,” he calibrates the velocity with a more honest, natural music. We don’t know whether the speaker is walking, riding a beast of burden, or in an energy- consuming vehicle, and while the question lingers in a mildly tantalizing way, the poem leaves a track of crisp (“the stark slanted peace’’) appreciation for a particular place.
Releasing the Days is an exceptionally fine showcase for a writer who understands where heart, soul and critical craft become one, and where absences are gracious additions to the breath and breadth of American letters.
