Waders

Andrew Motion’s Waders opens with “Evening Traffic,” a study of witness and perception that introduces a speaker whose mind figures as a sieve for nature and the world. This poem ends with the speaker “composing myself for a night flight,” into sleep:

When I look upward I see schools of fish
in one mind while they change direction,
and sunlight in a dimpled ring as if hands
were washing there, or reaching through.

The collection’s coastal landscapes—from Mersea Island and Chincoteague to Maine and, prominently, the North Sea—ground the book in the pastoral tradition. But the title poem is informed as much by family history and subjectivity as by place:

I try my father’s waders on for size
[…]
I only think of how to stand upright
with water hardening one second round
my ankles, and the next uprooting me
as though I have no purchase on the world.

Philosophical heir to Wallace Stevens (“Eventually I will realize my duty here / is to understand reality as it appears”), yet disjunctively postmodern (“Open the brain lid / glimpse the idea”), Waders moves fluidly between symbols of bonding and dissolution (rings, ocean, trees), environmental taxonomies, and poems whose teeming yet restrained cadences, as well as subjects, evoke Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, and Robert Hayden. The book ends with the 33-page “Essex Clay,” a verse memoir about grief told elliptically, concerning a mother’s riding accident and subsequent passing and a widowed father’s dementia, haunted by encounters with Juliet, an old love.

Vision centers Waders, “the eye delighting / a lifetime longer” and “the shining eye-machine / in the stalled remnants of life.” Suffused with near-surgical attention, these poems dilate space and time through the juxtaposition of images; precise, naturalist diction and aural euphony; and a dexterous range of forms employing perfect rhyme.

Waders asks what is “worth the risk of expression”; the answer is found in these poems, which insist on nature, love, and “the accurate dimension of eternity.”