Cavalier in a Roundhead School

Mary Ellen Miller was a poet and Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

A line in MacDonald’s “You Are a Pebble” makes a good metaphor for this collection: “my little book of things noticed.” In most of these poems, the poet notices very carefully; he’s especially good at describing the natural world and particularly good (for some reason) with cloud metaphors: “I couldn’t take my eyes off the sky /with its white convolutions /of uncorked thought” (“A Swig of Jamaica Rum”), and “white dumplings of cloud” (“A Prayer”).

Other examples (not randomly chosen) of his careful noticing are “where dark begonias fall /in cascades of natural lazy spite” (“Villa Imaginaire”), and “The house didn’t speak but looked hurt” (“Little Harbour”).

Few poets nowadays do anything interesting or effective with personification. MacDonald does. One has the feeling that he is a reader of poetry and that he keeps his own reader very much in mind. There are few strictly autobiographical poems in this collection, but the ones there are, like My Birthplace Lay Across the River,” are well done, not overdone.

Some of the poems seem unnecessarily difficult to follow: “The History of Art,” “An Illumination,” I Dream Through the Deep Mind’s Phases.” And some seem to go on after they have ended: “Leaving the Island” and “A Swig of Jamaica Rum,” for example. The best poems are those that deal with the colour and beauty of the natural world; the weakest are those that deal with death and philosophical abstractions. “Lines on Death” opens with a bad line, “What I fear tonight is the God-awful fear of Death,” and closes: “so far from Eden’s bluff has Mankind strayed.”

“In Memoriam” has these clumsy lines: “But within the blank white walls Estelle was dying, / unprepared for the frightening depth of a speechless cosmos.” This flat line is in sharp contrast with more typical lines, like “...oriental rugs in the brightest studios /purring their colours like old cats,” or interesting juxtapositions like “pastel violence” (“Leaving the Island”).

This is a good collection, worth any reader’s time.