A Vertical Mile

Characteristic poems in Richard Wakefield's A Vertical Mile focus on people in a landscape. Sometimes, as in "The Age of Miracles" or "A Scattering," they are literally united when the ashes of parents or a spouse are scattered in a beloved landscape. More often, the speaker is observing something in nature: a bull elk blocking the trail he is hiking, a dog chasing a coyote across a frosty field, the different yellows of daffodils, tansy, goldenrod, and autumn leaves as the seasons succeed each other, or, in the title poem, the way that climbing a mountain takes one back in time, the flowers blooming at the top having long been dead below. The characteristic tone is elegiac, as the speaker describes an abandoned house falling into gradual ruin, a forest taking the place of a former town, a community being devastated first by flood, then by fire. And the elegiac tone links up to the speaker's own awareness of impending death in hints of a cancer diagnosis in "MRI" and "Singled Out."But there are other tones and subjects that lend variety to the book: nostalgia for youthful happiness in "Spring, 1974," for wholehearted worship of beauty in "Petrarch," and for religious certainty in "Signs and Wonders." As a child of suburbia myself, I could appreciate Wakefield's deep love of nature without sharing it in the same way, but my favorite poems of his were those that looked at human nature. In "If Music Be the Food of Love," overhearing a couple's argument in a restaurant, only half muffled by the background music, he says:The words aren't clear. I know the tune, though, phrasedand cadenced, not a nuance unexpressed.It's Do we have to go through this again?and Can't you let it rest for just one night?and You don't want to talk right now? Then when?and You're the one who always has to fight!The speaker is nonplussed when his own wife turns to him and exclaims, "Oh sweetheart, listen! Isn't that our song?" This wry turn and its understated humor are also characteristic of Wakefield's poems and the ironic title, with its Shakespearean allusion, shows the deft way his broad literary knowledge adds depth to his poems.The brief excerpt above also illustrates Wakefield's clarity, conversational tone, and understated use of rhyme. He is so good at enjambment, and the wording reads so naturally, that one can almost forget that he is rhyming except for the lovely play of sounds that the rhymes contribute to. Most of his poems are narratives or meditations, longer than a sonnet, but seldom more than a page long. Many formalist poets who write narratives would resort to blank verse, but his are usually tightly rhymed, often in an abab rhyme scheme. His lines are usually iambic pentameter or tetrameter, with some shorter lines in a few poems for variety. His mastery of meter and rhyme makes his technique look easy, though it is actually quite challenging. But, as with all poems, the true test of their worth resides in what he has to say, not how he says it. His poems are moving, consistently interesting, and memorable.