The Wave That Will Beach Us Both
The Wave That Will Beach Us Both
by Charles Rafferty.
Still Waters Press, 1994.
22 pp.; paper, $5.50
Rafferty's poems are electrical: not of great, booming shafts of bolt-lightening, but of that marvelous, far-off filigree of pyrotechnics that floats and skitters of a summer night over the soft Appalachians, flashes unconnected to rain. And they ooze with orisons to emergence: "My voice went deep/ and all the girls said 'maybe'/ with their walks." They exude sexuality: "But, Love, I rejoiced in our wound/ as we met in our bed,/ bringing to the other/ the bandage of a body,/ the mystery of pain/ reconciled to touch." They speak of loss: "But today,/ the owl tree was empty, and the owl was not/ on the forest floor, vulnerable and fat/ ripping the lights from a muskrat's eyes./ And the owl was not a shadow, moving across/ the meadow like a gun sight. And the owl/ did not unblend from the bark, descending like/ an angel to bless those woods with talons."Rafferty's work is beautiful poetry--long, thin veils of language riding like fog above sequestered landscapes. The fog makes us focus on what he is saying underneath. One feels that same sense of the soul being physically touched when, viewing the mass graves at Jadwica: we cannot take in the enormity of what we see, finding it better/easier to focus on a scrap of dirty clothing that flutters in the wind. One wonders how the wind got down that deep and with so little compassion. Perhaps it is that scrap of clothing that tells the underlying tale. Perhaps it is the long, thin veils and the fog that tell Rafferty's tale. For these are not poems about skipping joyfully all the way home. The poems are uneasy, homeless. They make us want to wrap our arms around ourselves, around each other.
So clean is Rafferty's enunciation, he comes close to convincing us that the whole poetic process is effortless. For a telling of his trim, uncluttered phrasing, we read the opening lines of "Wednesday Night": "I light the day's eighth cigarette/ in the middle of a week/ that burns like the melting/ in a snow-filled fist." Or the closing ones: "I shift my chair, change/ the channel, and wait for my drink/ to pale itself with melting./ It almost takes forever./ I light the day's ninth cigarette." How deceptive such writing is! It seems to tell us that we can write like that too.
Syntactically, Rafferty is inventive. He gives us interesting patterns of darkness and light, arrangements of language that act as catalysts to his messages. His work is as full of linguistic color and as carefully positioned as flowersin a prize-winning floral arrangement. Because of his rare ability to see and then to express, Rafferty is already an imposing craftsman, even though _The Wave That Will Beach Us Both_ is his first book. He delivers, sings without any of the exhibitionism we witness in so much of contemporary verse.
Since this poet is young, we should rejoice: there is a lifetime of writing ahead of him. Like the lyric tenor's voice, the bottom of Rafferty's voice will darken, color to an even richer patina and take on new roles. We look forward to more collections of his poems, for they will surely come.
Review by June Owens
