HCSHR 4:2 — David Kawika Eyre, the nothing that is
HCSHR 4:2 — David Kawika Eyre, the nothing that is, Red Moon Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-947271-67-8. 150 pages. 20$US. redmoonpress.com
reviewed by Sandra Stephenson
The Scent of Nothing
I suppose this is an art book. A man’s life reduced to the barest, reduced to nothing and reborn as something: a reflection at dusk of a shadow of a person who loved. A last hallelujah on the eve of a “certain/ curtain” (p. 129); some of it brought on by Covid’s harsh reminders of mortality, and making sense of Alzheimer’s. The paintings, full of shadows and reflections in twilight blue, are beautiful.
Each poem is given supreme import by placing it alone in the middle of its own page. The first poem produces a delicate optical illusion of reflection, mirroring nicely the sense of the poem (p.9).
dawn
awed
anew
And what is the scent of delicacy? “spring light/ the scent/ of delicacy” (p. 11)
A bit abstract, even if you want to say that smell, at its most subtle, merges into sight. It would work as well or better as, “light/ the scent/ of spring”
There are many abstractions. As a haiku writer myself who fails consistently because of abstraction, I’m not averse to it. But to give the entire central line to a poem occupying the centre of a page, to the words “and whatever” (p. 14), means we’ve graduated from the Nothing of the title to Whatever.
The poems are too parsimonious. There are excised words that make a reader painfully conscious of the ascetic, even in a poem of excess: “mountain and i/ quiver” (p. 15). I feel that adding “the” and capital “I” would steal nothing from the nothing that’s already not there. And so many petals floating – why? What does the petal symbolize, aside from spring? Petals are symbols of fertility; fallen petals mean conception has happened or the chance was missed.
on being/ erosion/ of petals (p. 17)
Tulips accept something, ferns learn about wind (pp. 18 & 19). I’m doing a close reading, and I have a problem with personification which presumes. It’s Not There. But there is detectable humour with cat poems throughout: like the feral cat, starting from scratch (p. 20).
Here’s an example of a nothing poem: sunny day/ a fly/ luxuriates (p. 24). Doin’ nothin’ goin’ nowhere in the middle of the page. All that blank space. What are we to make of it? “Beloved lowlifes” seems to be a theme, but Eyre clearly doesn’t think of them as lowlifes.
Now and then a poem pings: tree frog call/ the static/ of warm rain. When you listen in your mind to call up the sound of rain, and tune into it as static, then the tree frog’s call cutting through it is louder than life. Calling up something out of nothing. Making it up as we go, like Eyre’s butterflies p. 33). You get a feel for it by about page 35.
dawn/ hymn/amen (p. 41)
It goes on, gets wordier! Cleverness abounds. “May first […] mayhem” (p. 43), and we’re into fruit and love poetry for 30 pages of summer, social consciousness, then “erosion/ of precision” into age and death (fall and winter). “The shadow of a doubt” (93) used to good effect…. “that/ it happens at all” (97).
My teachers never let me get away with vagueness. Something, somewhere… Yet this poem got me where a poem is supposed to get you once in a while, in the gut:
where—somewhere/ beneath the leaves/ a daughter’s ashes (p. 102)
The poems are like waves: with regularity some “fold[]/ and whiten” (124), others just pass and leave quiet. Alzheimer’s shows up, looking like a reason to write this stumbling through simplest thoughts from jan./etc/[to] dec (139). I wouldn’t call it philosophical, though philosophers and thinkers are quoted for a few pages in addendum. It just IS. Editors have found Something in them, attested by the long list of publishing credits at the end of the book.
review by Sandra Stephenson
February 2021