Deborah Pope: Take Nothing

While in New York recently, I visited the Strand Bookstore, which is akin to the hajj for bibliophiles—everyone should do it at least once in their life. It’s encouraging to see the venerable seller of new and used books has survived not only the global shift to online shopping but creeping gentrification as well (I remember when Union Square was a very dicey area).

I came home with a few treasures, both from poets I knew and poets who were new to me. One of those is Take Nothing, by Deborah Pope. It’s part of the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, which has been issuing a remarkably strong slate of books every year since its inception more than 20 years ago. Pope has three previous collections, which somehow never made it onto my radar—which is surprising, considering the immediate affinity I felt. 

I don’t know if she’d consider herself a Nature poet, but she’s at her best when she turns her keen powers of observation and metaphor upon the natural world. In “Encounter,” for example, she comes home to find a red-tailed hawk on a lawn chair, which “cocked the copper curve / of its head, sharpening / the profile of the black, sickle beak.” Its calm self-assurance and power leaves her, “there’s no other word for it— / raptured.” How could you not love that self-reflexive joy of finding the perfect word—one that both clearly defines the emotion and brings a clever pun as well?

One of my favorite pieces in the book, “Snapping Turtle,” tells of a similar encounter. She finds the turtle of the title in the middle of the road, and stops to coax it across before another car comes and runs it over. The image of a woman hunched over, wiggling a finger in front of a massive snapping turtle is fabulously absurd—but what’s even more absurd is that it actually seems to work. The turtle, though, is not moved by an understanding of her benign intentions, but from an instinctive violence, evident in “the concentrated menace of its advance.” There’s a hint of Bishop in these lines. I’m thinking most specifically of “The Fish,” which also portrays an ancient, prehuman sensibility, and a suspicion of violence behind every rainbow. 

Pope carries it further in “Currents,” which presents a great blue heron on a river bank. She watches as it takes “a delicate, stately step / on impossibly thin legs, / hinged like the ribs of a folding umbrella.” What a perfect simile! In some ways, her work is reminiscent of another of my favorites, Mary Oliver—but while Oliver more typically portrays a detached wonder and reflection in stillness, Pope more actively engages with her subjects.

I could go on about the force of Nature in her work, but let me jump to “At the Next Congregation for the Causes of Saints.” The final stanza is a floral compendium, with talk of purslane, mulleins, burdocks, teasels, cat-tails, fleabane, and Scotch broom. I’m sure these are not just names she pulled out of a hat, but flowers she genuinely recognizes by sight. I am reminded of yet another of my favorite writers, Isaac Babel, who recalls an old mentor pointing at all the trees and birds that he would see every day and ask what they were. To his chagrin, he did not know. The old man concludes with, “And you presume to write?… A man who does not live in nature as a bird or an animal lives in it will never write two worthwhile lines in all his life.”

I don’t know if Pope has read Babel, but I suspect she would agree with that sentiment. Perhaps that’s why she can give us such fabulous descriptive metaphors: a cluster of tadpoles “still a nova of apple seeds,” a rusted out bridge a “steel cat’s cradle” (I hope younger readers know what that is), a rat snake “black as a shredded tire.”

What i find great about Nature poets is when they consider people and society with the same sense of curiosity and wonder. That’s exactly what Pope does in the first section of the book, which focuses on childhood memories of a troubled family that is at times harmonious, at times unhappy in its own way. It’s clear she gets her affinity for the natural world from her father, who seemed far more at home alone in a fishing boat than driving a station wagon full of kids through town. Some of these poems have the tone of an adult trying to peel away the unreliable accretions of memory to get at the actual facts and understand them from a grown-up perspective, rather than just accept them from a child’s view. Others display a willful desire to do the opposite: “I refuse to remember / the details,” she writes. We learn of her father’s drinking, gambling, and fatal cancer, and her mother’s failed attempts to leave him, all of which remain confusing for an adult, incomprehensible for a child. And yet there seems to have been genuine love and affection in the family. Hence, the sense of poignancy and wistfulness.

I mentioned Pope’s penchant for finding the perfect word. One in particular will always stay with me: in “Too Close to See,” she concludes by describing “grief” as “unanswerable.” In all our vast language, I can think of no better word.

Many of the poems in this collection appear in journals that I often read, so it’s not surprising that I’m drawn her work—though all the more surprising that I have not encountered it before.