David Rivard’s poems are always in motion. They leap, sidestep, turn, shift focus, double back, and skid forward, all at the speed of thought. I once compared the experience of reading Rivard’s work to following a friend who’s a better skier down an expert run you wouldn’t make alone; by following his line, you get to the bottom, exhilarated. That feeling is still fresh In Some of You Will Know, Rivard’s seventh collection. His wry, intimate, and worldly takes on human experience keep a reader off balance, as his meditations consider everything from eye-rolling teens to a Givenchy blouse to the pain of reinvention.
Some of You Will Know opens with a vision of estrangement and loneliness. “I say I / don’t know what’s / wrong with me,” “You Say You Don’t Know” begins, Rivard’s kinetically enjambed lines a lead-in to images of stasis: “sunflowers / stuck in themselves” and words waiting “on the tip of my tongue.” “You all / … / say you don’t know / what’s wrong / with you, but /of course you do, / you have to”; the poem concludes with a recognition of helplessness and self-delusion, troubles the book will consider, and work its way through.
Although Rivard’s poems rarely hang on a subject, several emerge throughout the book: the breakup of a long marriage; death of friends and family; our queasy relationship with political struggle; a natural world still able to astonish; and the exigencies of love and work. Like “You Say You Don’t Know,” “Pond” begins with a series of statements and revisions: “You aren’t the first to feel these things –– /or are you? … // you whose loneliness became you/if you thought yourself the first/would it change you? (I bet that/ you would like to be changed).” What manages, effortlessly, to change is the natural world, described in one of Rivard’s gobsmacking images as a drink “taken in long sips from that hip flask/a tree carries as it walks through winter & spring”. The elixirs of “wild traceries of green at the tips of/poplars and willows” feed “thousands of polliwogs and minnows” in language as ecologically precise as it is lyrical. The poem ends with a transformative baptism, loneliness wavering “below you/on the sandy bottom as you float” with “your shadow/a cloak dark & cold as your shame/warm & dark as your freedom.”
Rivard’s poems, so alert to the world, don’t omit its predations. In “Open Secret,” a Russian-sponsored attack on Ukraine intrudes as “a video of the long line / of refrigerated freight cars / stacked with black body bags” in the wake of a starling, first wading in water “dark & clean & earthy /like water that dried mushrooms have soaked in,” then leaving “iridescent droplets” as it flies off. The two exist in the same “available / atmosphere or solution / whether shimmering, cool water/or air full of pagan heat.” The poem brings a surge of immediacy to its conclusion through a single heartbeat: “one heartbeat ends the past/and begins / the future.” Is it the bird’s, or does it belong to the atrocity’s investigators in goggles “dark & shiny as the pupils of salmon / buried to the chins in crushed ice”? Does it describe the speaker or the dead? With his two final lines in the heart’s own rhythm, Rivard charges the page with consequence.
Rivard’s books have long taught readers how to follow his leaps from one perception to the next. Occasionally the aerials in Some of You Will Know seem forced, rather than arising organically from the play of the mind. I’m not convinced by the intrusion of “a truckload of bodies / to be autopsied tomorrow at a morgue in Gaza” in “Open and Shut,” a poem encompassing a father’s death –– even the sound of the words is flat. Rivard returns to form in the wry lines that follow –– “My father / … / asked / once that I never mention him again / in a book of poems.” When Rivard writes a stanza that doesn’t get off the ground, a lapse in the poet’s usually impeccable ear is a giveaway: “Orderliness threatens us constantly / miserable with its confinement –– / responsibility, achievement, reliability ––”. Among poems touching on family and childhood, “Seeker” and “Fare Thee Well” fly high. Here the transition from early to late middle age, with bolder intimations of mortality, adds sting to the past and the memory of it.
“Love and work are the cornerstones to our humanness,” Freud wrote, and it’s also the capstone to Some of You Will Know. In “Eyes Closed, Rye Beach,” Rivard writes: “my marriage is over … / my father … dead / five years –– Tony has died, without a word –– the hooded child / lags farther & farther behind … / … / … / all those bits & pieces / of a story I brought with me to Amy.” The two make a new story from the “loveliest phrase,” Snowflake Appaloosa, “the guide had said / as she stood in the doorway / … like a password.” And at the center of “Our Words,” Rivard writes to his friend, “I was telling you how my life would end / before my work did, which was true for you too;” a reader can only add, “Amen.” A poet who’s relaxed into his idiom and style, Rivard has once again produced visions both brilliant and whole from our confounding, fragmented world.
[Published by Arrowsmith Press on October 13, 2022, 86 pages, $20.00 paperback]