James Bertolino

Initially, I imagined James Bertolino’s Finding Water, Holding Stone would dovetail all too neatly with my preconceptions about “poetry of the Pacific Northwest”. There is nature here, elemental imagery like…well, water and stone. There is ice and sand; there are blackbirds and wrens, crabs, caterpillars, lupine and saplings, clay, and an unwavering attention to darkness and light. There are the overtures toward the spiritual tropes that these iconic symbols suggest.

However, I found myself surprised by these poems time and again.

These are nature poems but there is very often a grounded scientific twist to balance the romantic pastoral. For example, in “Sun Worship” (was there ever a title that made you think of residents of the Pacific Northwest?), we learn a biology lesson about tent caterpillars:

If you see a chalky spot that glows
Against the dark of the forehead, it means
this supplicant has been chosen
by a wasp who’s laid an egg….

…it will hatch
and feed greedily on the sacrificial host.
Swollen then with such rich nourishment, such
spiritual fat, the young wasp will poke
a portal through… (23)

The nature here is fascinating and delightfully horrific in its own right, which gives the final spiritual gesture a little breathing room.

Bertolino’s poems are slippery; they allow for such breathing room throughout the entire book. There is a deft uncertainty to the language, especially in the first section of the book, “Finding Water”. This feels appropriate, as water’s fluidity and changeability matches this section’s preoccupation with “what is temporary and/ in danger” (14). The poet makes no certain assertions, even with his figurative language:

…the marshy lowlands, fetid acres
that were a brown that moved, that seemed //
to undulate like the skin of an enormous snake… (18)

…heavy clouds seem to smother/ the islands… (21)

…When snow falls //
and a green mystery is carried
by all that moves… (29)

These poems are constantly changing, shifting in both shape and meaning. In “Flares”, which is hands down my favorite poem in the collection, the speaker tells us:

One of my gestures was, then wasn’t, //
then was…

…Sun flares make the world strange.
Something is changing shape,

and I’ve heard it’s my heart. (52)

The speaker cannot even refer to his own heart with any certainty; he must rely on rumors of what he’s heard. It is not until the last section of the book (”Having Stone”) that the poems take a turn toward what may be our only certainties: loss, violence, and death. The everyday is hard and dangerous. For example, even within the benign setting of “A Picnic Scene”:

Behind it all foliage is busy
practicing its fractal variations, sometimes
hiding, sometimes revealing
the splendid, unsheathed
talons. (57)

But even here, we cannot be sure of what threatens us. Danger is irregular, broken, sharply beautiful and—above all else—unpredictable. And this is exactly how James Bertolino’s poems strike me.… (lisätietoja)