Reflecting on Dan Maguire's Finding the Words

Several of the poems in Dan Maguire’s fine chapbook, Finding the Words (published in October 2008 by Plan B Press), are framed by travel and the passing of time. Within that framework, the poet examines life’s hardships, hard-won victories, and the challenges of the writing process, and contrasts the scope of a human life to the span of eons. Strong imagery and careful attention to form and sound — the “music” of poetry — provide aesthetic gratification for the reader throughout the book, and ground the extended metaphors and complex themes in reality. The poems’ weight and density are powered and given uplift by the poet’s deftly chosen language and sly sense of humor.

Raised in the Manayunk section of Philadelphia and in Haddonfield, New Jersey, Maguire has lived in New England, Arizona and Baltimore, with intervening stays in New Jersey. These peregrinations are reflected in poems such as “Counting Rivers” and “Where We Live.” In the latter, the narrator visits his parents’ bungalow in Ocean City, where little besides their photographs and furniture remain:

. . . mundane inessentials
murmuring of other lives.
Like a cloud that forms, then rains
itself away above the ocean,
I have washed back to New Jersey.

A walk to the beach reveals the Army Corps of Engineers attempting another reclamation of the sand that has been eroded by hurricanes. He muses about the fragility and adaptability of life while watching the Corps’ pressured pipes, “sucking up the ocean floor from a quarter mile out, / fabricating beach from sea-bed.” As a result, sea creatures “that had hoped to live out their days in the dark” are “impelled into the sunlight, / legless things, forced to run a surrealistic gauntlet,” as the gulls have gathered above, feasting on the easy pickings.

The poem’s richness derives not from allegory or direct symbolism, but from the juxtaposition of the narrator’s situation and the man vs. nature and nature vs. nature struggles he observes. The ocean destroys and re-creates on a grand scale while the human attempt to renew the beach continues in near-futility. The narrator feels out of place at his parents’ house, to which he has returned, seemingly out of obligation rather than for pleasure. The beach is both familiar and changed by storm and ocean. Here, the process of natural selection adapts itself to man’s interference and all living things have little control over their circumstances. The poem concludes:

. . . We are all rooted —- engineers and
politicians, seagulls and my ragged, traveled self.
Yet we imagine it is choice that pulls us back,
each to our own.
We return, deny hurricanes,
try to tell the ocean where it lives.

In an era when the minimalist influence in poetry sometimes seems to stunt exposition, Maguire’s poems, while carefully pruned, are rich examinations of his themes. Minimalism favors the reduction of the repetition and variation of sounds, phrases and images, but Maguire uses these tools to make his large subjects accessible. They also facilitate the parallel development of rhythmic and tonal relationships in a medium that is meant to be heard as much, if not more than, read. The result is poetry in which sound and rhythm propel multi- faceted ideas and nuanced emotions.

The title poem finds the narrator walking through the woods at sunset, “the time for finding words.” Maguire allows two stanzas to set a scene —- “the denouement of dusk” —- and to provide clues to the narrator’s frame of mind, before touching on several hefty themes. The quarter-moon, described as “slightly worn, / a bit burned-out” that “rises quickly, quickly / disappears, useless as lightning over oceans,” leads to a contrasting consideration of the rocks:

Once, I heard the stones exchange
their secrets about the ravages of water,
some prophesied apocalypse, epoch of rain.
Tonight the monoliths are close-mouthed,
the rocks and pebbles sleep, or merely wait for me
to leave.

Clearly, a mature narrator is weighing his place in the grand scheme of things, but is not too preoccupied to notice, “Beside the path, a patch of white; a cat’s small skull.” He wonders at the cat’s past: feral stray or, “More likely / someone’s old companion, whose return is still / expected, a back door waiting, slightly open.” This nudge at Hamlet, who finds in a graveyard the skull of the jester he knew in childhood, adds a wry touch that serves to balance the poem’s brooding tone.

In the final stanza, the narrator realizes that the words he sought on his walk have eluded him, found by “another seeker, / another- where”. Although the narrator of the poem has not found the words, the poet certainly has. This implicit irony, found in many of Maguire’s poems about writing, is sharply focused in the last three lines, in which he wonders if the words he sought will give voice to “some animal that’s just now gone / extinct.” The ephemeral nature of an individual life, and that of an entire species, link several of the poem’s ideas and end it expansively with the opening of a new idea.

“Nocturne” also voices the frustrating, elusive nature of the process of writing, while demonstrating the poet’s fluency. Opening stanzas ripe with rhyme and consonance depict the nighttime setting:

. . . things
that hide and seek with little leaks of light,
that sneak beneath the drag of vision,
the squint and blink of failing sight

The narrator is (or allows himself to be) distracted by the multitude of little things and thoughts that poets often feel are keeping them from writing “—-are the windows / locked? The doors? The paper waits / for scratching . . .” When the words finally come, “whining like mosquitoes,” they “march around the room / like matadors, hoping for horns” and “bleed / within the seams of your insomnia until they / disappear.” In this poem and throughout the book, Maguire applies simile and words with multiple meanings to familiar images, turning them inside out. This technique offers original pathways of imagination and provokes the blended emotional respons- es that accompany them.

Maguire builds several poems in Finding the Words around conceits that are both solid and flexible enough to hold them together and to keep the extended metaphors from sounding strained. “What the Wind Remembers” begins with images of youthful exuberance:

Knife-thin, I sliced my way,
caught the cat’s-paw breeze,
embraced the brazen gale

The second stanza, in the second person, addresses someone the narrator cares about and leaves no doubt that the wind, at least in part, represents the difficulties and hazards that life presents. The narrator describes a friend troubled and ill-adapted to “walking in the wind”:

Too thin for shelter, I watched it pull you up,
not caring you were green
and needed earth around your roots.

By the poem’s conclusion, Aeolus —- regent of the winds in Greek mythology —- has buffeted the narrator, too, “he seeks me out for sport,” and the wind “envelops me / in fears as stale as blankets from a cellar trunk.” Life has turned hard but the poet grasps meaning and even beauty from the uncontrollable and nullifying forces at work in the world.

“Open Mic at the Painted Bride” (subtitled, “An homage to T.S. Eliot”) and “Losing the Day” are also constructed on conceits. The for- mer takes off from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and hilariously skewers various familiar denizens of the contemporary poetry scene. “Losing the Day” has a looseness to it that is saved from laxity by humor that grows from the recitation of a number of com- plaints often heard from neglected or scorned lovers and spouses. The narrator directs his grievances at personified “Day” and kneads them into new shapes. It begins:

Day stumbles home like a bachelor,
stubs its toe on crouching fog and slams the door.

The narrator has been “waiting up all night for day, worried”, and notes that “Even when it’s here, day is short with me.” He laments:

What happened to the day I fell in love with,
that always showed up early and on time?
I know I’ve gotten older—-day reminds me of it
every chance it gets, sneaking into mirrors,
streaking my reflection onto window panes.

The language of a jilted lover’s suspicion and jealousy that Maguire fashions around his metaphor reveals the narrator’s insecurities about the difficult aspects of his life —- aging, insomnia, the drudgery of daily existence —- but finally gives way to new resolve: “Day, my friend, I’ve had enough.” Instead of waiting for his old love to reform itself or for a perfect version of it to come along, the narrator vows to “use each one / that passes by my window or knocks/ on my backdoor.” He will play the victim no longer:

I will illuminate by casting shadows, use
the darkness that’s inside me—-I know it’s there—
grow a fire from my own sweet spark
and let the day take care of itself.

The poet, working in the solitary realm of aesthetic choices, in the shadows — and sometimes upon the shoulders — of great writers of the past, soon learns that to wait for inspiration, like waiting for perfect love, is futility.

Maguire headed a section of his previous book of poems, Somewhere Between, by quoting Eliot: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” This citation lies at the core of Maguire’s sense of humor. In this sense, “stealing” can be the jumping off point for a new idea. When Maguire “steals”, he does so, like all genuine artists, in order to create something new from the stolen goods. Sometimes this process is not conscious. Is the crouching fog on which the day stubs its toe in Maguire’s poem the same that Carl Sandberg found, “looking/ over harbor and city/ on silent haunches,” or, more likely, a refraction of that image? The justification of the theft — if there has been one — is found in the originality, pleasure and insight to be gleaned from the repositioning and restructuring of fine material. In despair, the poet, like anyone, will accomplish nothing. On the edge of despair, he can still dance and sing. While sighing in resignation to the indignities of middle age and the frustrations of broken relationships and aesthetic imperfection, Maguire persists to scratch the page, to bang the keypad. Like a Samuel Beckett character who “can’t go on,” he goes restlessly on, finding surprising conduits for expressing experience. If the poems are at times dense and complicated, they are seldom abstruse. The sparks from the fires he tends along the way are not always sweet but frequently brilliant, the light shed full of humanity: remarkable accomplishments, all.