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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE FORTY: Jun-Aug (07) > Reviews >David Whyte's River Flow: New & Selected Poems, 1984-2007...reviewed by James Owens

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River Flow: New & Selected Poems, 1984-2007
David Whyte
Many Rivers Press
ISBN Number: 978-1-932887-17-4

Reviewer: James Owens



David Whyte, author of River Flow: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007, is a rare instance in the 21st century, a professional poet who does not depend on an academic position for a living. In addition to writing and selling his books, Whyte takes his message about the relevatory and transforming power of poetry into "the world of the bottom line," delivering lectures and holding seminars for the management of American and British corporations, who have discovered a need, according to Whyte´s website, "to understand the wellsprings of human creativity in order to shape conversations that are invitational to an individual´s greater powers. Good poetry can provide explosive insight, grant needed courage and stir the dormant imagination of individuals and organizations alike."

The language of the quote, with its talk of the "wellsprings of human creativity" and stirring "the dormant imagination," gets close to the core of Whyte´s main project as a poet. His poems strip away the distracting demands of work or technological life to get at the primal experiences that have often been obscured in the modern world and which are renewed through poetry. This stripping away and revealing of essentials often seems to happen for Whyte in the closely observed natural world, usually his adopted home in the forests and sea of the American Northwest, or in ancestral landscapes laden with familial and historical significance, especially Yorkshire, where he grew up, or the West of Ireland, where his mother was a native. Whyte writes more clearly in the tradition of William Wordsworth than almost any other contemporary poet, though his poems also nod to more recent practitioners in the same line, such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.

"The Thicket" offers one good pathway into Whyte´s work. This poem records its speaker´s memories of one childhood summer spent hiding in a thicket away from the notice of other people, where "I could be free and observant/ surveying the tiny stages and the curtained dramas." Though the child is happy in his solitude and concealment and wants them to continue, that proves to be impossible.

All that summer I thought I could make it last,
never leave the branching world where, permanent
in my innocence, I could sit, a child abroad beyond
the house and call of waving neighbors,
a crouched pilgrim, an apprentice to stealth and silence,
still and sovereign at the center of my shadowed world,
a kind of enclosed womb-like eternity that could
end only with the annunciation that another, wider
and wiser eternity was about to begin.

The coming "annunciation" is, of course, the advent of adolescence and eventually adulthood, with their new concerns and desires, initially incomprehensible to the child who sees their early stirring as a "minute searching of the/ stained glass light searching between the branches." The significance of all this weighs upon the adult speaker who looks back on the boy´s summer in the thicket, the meaning of the poem unfolding in the space between the two states of being, dependent on the power of memory to recover lost truths.

Something fought and sought and found me
in the hedge, gripped me with a new intelligence,
arrested me and set me to motion,
brought clarity to silence, set me to grow
and take the body out of hiding,
made me see the shadows stir with new
and revelatory intolerance, the hooked briars
raw with dispensation and beckoning.

Though Whyte´s poems recognize the inevitability of exile into the adult world, they are always on the lookout for ways back into the child´s openness and "innocence" (a favored word for Whyte). For example, "Ten Years Later," though it is separated from "The Thicket" by half of the book and is relocated to the Pacific Northwest, is easy to read as an update on the same sensibility that informed the earlier poem. The poet finds himself kayaking alone out to a deserted island known for its wildflowers:

A calm and lonely, trembling beauty
that frightened me in youth.

Now their loneliness
feels familiar, one small thing
I´ve learned these years,

how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness
how to be found by the world....

There is one world only,
the one to which we gave ourselves
utterly, and to which one day

we are blessed to return.

At 376 pages, River Flow is unusually generous for a selected volume, and its more than twenty years´ worth of poems, wisely arranged thematically with an alternate chronological table of contents, offers many points of entry into David Whyte´s world, in addition to the Wordsworthian interaction between childhood and adult life. A reader could follow up the poems´ frequent religious tone, with all their "annunciation" and "dispensation" and blessedness and sacramental feel for natural objects, or follow along with Whyte as he meditates about just what it might mean to be an English poet with Irish roots who has chosen as habitat "the open/ moor of the American/ mind" (“Yorkshire").

In the end, all these different approaches will probably lead to the same place. "The Seven Streams," a poem which is about the uniting of both literal and figurative streams into the one river, provides a sense of Whyte´s feeling for the poet´s vocation and expands over the book as a whole from its setting near Mulloch Mor in Ireland.

....Stand above the Seven Streams
letting the deep down current surface
around you, then branch and branch
as they do, back into the mountain
and as if you were able for that flow,
say the few necessary words
and walk on, broader and cleansed
for having imagined.

This is, one supposes, the very sort of cleansing that Whyte offers his corporate clients in seminars and retreats. Fortunately, the poems´ power is not limited to that setting. Anyone who stands in the streams of River Flow is likely to emerge "broader and cleansed."
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