A wrack line is a coastal feature where organic material and other debris are deposited at high tide. It thus serves as a spatial boundary between land and sea, and a zone of interaction between nature’s rhythms and mankind’s waste. Just as this space is simultaneously random and regular, so its etymology webs many meanings from wreck to misery, vengeance, ruin, and stretch. This liminal space between land and water functions as a focal point in M.W. Jaeggle’s debut collection, Wrack Line, where poetic lines meet mind and landscape, and sift through metaphors impressed on the poet’s rhythmic sensibility that lunges and latches: “would the sea, the sea, / motion still, then repeat?” Accretions and accumulations of the cover’s northern acorn barnacles and Pacific silt sift through his precise elegiac lines and continental drifts, thought and afterthought. Tagore’s words may be applied to the watercolours in this volume: “dance of the water, / sings the pebbles into perfection;” as would Cormac McCarthy’s “thin dark rim of wrack.”
The eponymous “Wrack Line” features a “dowitcher with the head of Janus,” an indication of the poet’s affinity for birds and his double perspective in the surrounding world and self. A periscopic Janus is the appropriate vehicle for surveying a double-edged wrack line, and Jaeggle uses the same image in a later poem where a cross is Janus-faced. His twofold vision adjusts to fields and beaches: “One face / revering the wrack line” – in poems that are reverential and referential. Shape-shifting borders, wrack lines gather whatever the water has offered the shore: “—blanched Pepsi caps, / mummified kelp, sticks sea-eaten and stripped clean.” Amidst all the sea’s detritus, the first stanza ends on a clean note; what begins blanched finishes clean, the long dash diminished to a hyphen in the rhythmic sea-eaten whose long e’s are sandwiched between Pepsi and clean. Indeed, the rhythms and sounds of the lines imitate tidal heaving, the wrack line merging with the writing line, nature observed by the poet accounting for his life. The poet identifies with a dowitcher thumbing its long bill, but he begins the poem in a more abstract contemplation that becomes a refrain in the other stanzas: “And ask me whether what I have done is my life, / and I will say look.” The answer lies in the keen observation of nature, and a commitment to the sea and to seeing the softened sounds of alliteration in “wh” and l.
The second half begins: “Notice the other half, the face fixed to the sky.” With the other half turned skyward, the poet-bird registers sound from arresting f’s to “bill nicking shells, tapping lure.” And “the music that will appear when bottle glass, / once shard but now a rounded green, is juggled / between their clicking chopstick beaks.” Jaeggle’s doubled juggling in onomatopoeic beaks links wrack line, poet, and bird in their dualities. All of these borderlines are transformative from blanched Pepsi caps to rounded green bottle glass, sounded to the sea. The final stanza repeats the parallel lifeline: “Ask me whether what I have done is enough.” To which the speaker replies: “and I’ll say let there be the loss that a wrack line records.” The wrack line salvages a life, sorts sound, recovers and reclaims “how the cold air whistles on a beach.” Jaeggle’s wrack line expands at the end of the poem from “while we suture” to “each in our own way a historian of waves.” The poet sutures past, present, and future, juggling the halves and waving the music; what is lost is recaptured in details of seeing and listening. He polishes barnacles in the rough: pearls at sea, precious stones unearthed. Inevitably Janus is bifocal and bi-vocal.
Jaeggle’s double duty recurs in “Colville’s Horses”: “It’s how a cross in a field can be Janus-faced, / at once a memorial and a celebration of expulsion.” The first in a sequence of seven linked, ekphrastic sonnets writes through Colville’s French Cross, 1988, as Colville’s horses canter through the gallery of Jaeggle’s mind. The poet paints the minutiae of field mice rushing between tufts of grass and “the unpainted birds really there only in mind.” His gaze is introspective and retrospective, tinged in pigments of imagination: “the red horse with each heavy step shedding its colour / to the well-worn path cutting through the pasture.” Each poem in this series captures equine movement and stasis. Everything is “fluent in leaving” and “time-tinted, like an afterthought of pink flowers.” Each poem is an afterthought inspired by the original painting. The poet asks “How does the present tense pivot in history?” and answers after three quatrains in a concluding couplet: “It’s such a question, you think, pulling a string fixed to a woman’s shoulder, / compelling her head to turn back, as if somebody had called out her name.” Similes turn heads, and the Janus turn is doubled in the repetition of the final line that begins the second sonnet, based on Colville’s Girl on a Piebald Horse, 1952.
This second head turning involves “that other species of thought – a memory, this one of a sister’s death.” Memory or afterthought “plays too close to a shoreline after heavy rain, then cascades, / like leaves through dense branches, into the Shubenacadie.” This wrack line in Nova Scotia leads to the final quatrain: “Barefoot at the edge, duende dancing to the heartbeat / against her collar and the sight of her piebald horse out in the field, steam rising off its back.” That initial heavy beat in “Barefoot” stamps the rhythm of the dance and heartbeat that follow, while the foreign duende opens up to the line’s enjambment and expansion in the second line. At the edge is where “she had said to herself, / if I have ever known softness, it’s somewhere in that smoke.” All the sibilants in steam, softness, somewhere, and smoke participate in the dance of duende. The mystery of duende inheres in Colville’s colours and Jaeggle’s linked sonnets.
The third sonnet, based on Colville’s Horse and Train, repeats the horse’s heartbeat and shifts the smoke to the train, which becomes a “symbol for colonial thinking,” counterpoised to a train of thought in similes that expand the stanzas. As the first simile returns to the previous sonnet, it also underlines the function of ekphrastic similitude in the sonnet’s parallel tracks: “matching the islands in the sky like the memories of siblings / or the grain of two violins cut from the same tree.” The resonance of grain and rail works through the Tantramar Marsh: “just another way / to note the absence of the sun, the depth of forest green.” The train of colonial thinking runs in tandem with the poet’s train of thought – “how the crossties count down the horse’s heartbeats.” The third stanza questions the order in horsepower: “Would this answer sound like guidance, but feel like force?” The final stanza begins with another simile, “Like everything held too close for too long,” before ending with another question: “how quickly would you shift your sympathy to a train?” Jaeggle holds Colville close in his quest, questions, and equestrian thinking. His “centrifugal voice” carries the foreground to the edge of a vanishing point.
Heightened by alliteration, his comparative mode of similes and metaphors glides from sonnet to sonnet: “As slowly as a persimmon sweetens in the sun” and “as clearly as a sliver nags a nerve.” In his own careful pace, the poet follows Colville’s Two Pacers until “sounds marble into a cacophony, like wind / through willow tree, hail on tin roof or back porch.” In its verb form “marble” becomes onomatopoeic and synaesthetic, carrying sounds until the poet, as if pulling on pacing reins, pauses his thought as “enough,” and “that what comes before that enough is simply / a dwelling for hesitation, the mind’s feeding roommates.” If wrack line is a dwelling for hesitation, then Janus anatomizes mind’s roommates. At the finish line “you’re winded at the gate” – both the hinge of sound and space, and the horse’s moving gait. Jaeggle photograph’s “Colville’s Horses” in phonic forms of thudding heart and “wet burlap sack.”
Jaeggle’s affinity for painterly scenes and subjects may be found in many of his earlier poems in this volume. “Sing Against the Lake,” influenced by Denise Levertov’s “Variation on a Theme by Rilke,” opens with the poet at the lake: “There it was, confronting him – a lake and the retreating light.” Commas and dash pause for a visual and aural ripple in lake and light. This ripple continues in the second line’s repetition of “before” and rhyme of night with light: “Before night came down, before the darkness could take him.” The confrontation develops in the hard verbs of “came down” and “could take him,” leading to an increase in magnitude: “it struck his side” and “The blow rang out.” Gradually or suddenly, ripple turns to internal echo: “what he heard was his voice projecting across the water, / the oar cutting through the thought.” Each thought is captured in precise phrases that wave through the end of the stanza: “watery pitch, / cries swallowed, cold joints, a muted heart.”
A shorter second stanza turns to morning and a chorus of loons where sound and sight converge near the wrack line of revelation: “saw their notes split fog and uncover the cascara near the shore.” The initial blow is echoed in the second stanza, even as Levertov and Rilke ripple through the repetition: “Those sensitive to circumstance hold against the blow” – a gentle violence that stirs between the speaker’s gesture of his teacup against his lips and the final line: “then they find an inner pew and sing.” Well versed in voice and vision, Jaeggle joins the chorus of Levertov and Rilke in a song of himself and nature. His troubadour’s song is a template for his own contemplations: “modestly preening words, / slowly bending emphasis into rising intonation, / the openness of a lilt.” Bending is his dominant gesture: the sun bending over in “As Moths Gently Thud the Porch Light,” knees bending in “Autumn, According to Childhood,” mother kneeling in “Chetamon Mountain, Jasper,” and bent knees in “Water Pump Vernacular.” These secular genuflections revere the details of nature and self, “as crucial as the space / between prayer beads” – as essential as ubiquitous in-between spaces.
Family lines thread through a number of poems, from the poet’s grandmother (“Wool Overcoat”) and great-grandfather (“Sehnsucht”), to his children (“A Game Between Siblings”). The dominant mood is one of yearning and wistful longing, whether in the beauty of “Apricity” or domesticity of “Dust Being a Patina on Silence.” Janus’s double duende of moving repose shores up ruins and wracks in an assured debut that augurs well for future volumes.
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, M.W. Jaeggle is the author of three chapbooks, Janus on the Pacific, The Night of the Crash, and Choreography for a Falling Blouse. He lives in Buffalo, New York, where he is a PhD student in the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo. Wrack Line is his first book of poetry.
- Publisher : University of Regina Press (Sept. 23 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 80 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0889779538
- ISBN-13 : 978-0889779532
