Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I’m always interested in seeing how people who move here from other places describe it. Poet Deirdre Lockwood, who lives in Seattle now, has included several Northwest-inspired poems among those about other places and subjects in her first collection, An Introduction to Error.
Here’s one of them:
Animalia Pacifica
1. Estuary Logic
Just before sunset the otter
sleek and river-combed
crept up on the rock
to dismantle a crab
c l a w s f l a i l i n g
I heard the crunch
and crack as he eyed me ate
then his darkness
became the water’s
2. Hum
It’s that squeaky scritching
sends me searching for him—
more insect than bird—
persistent, whittling the air.
Stand still long enough and spot
the silhouette of bobbin and spindle,
or bar dart needling a higher branch,
short king announcing spring.
Is it fear or thrill that starts him
speed-diving down, playing wind
through fluted wings
then soaring up again—a joke,
Juliet! All my emeralds and rubies
I lay at your throat.
3. Reunion
The crows gather there:
the parking lot
behind the university gym
each afternoon, they say,
because it used to be
a burial ground,
then a dump
overlooking Union Bay.
After the Cut
was dredged, the lake
fell 9 feet, birthing
small peaty islands,
one named Broken.
I skirt the lot as they converge,
shrill and cross, searching for the passage
one canoe wide
before the scars and maps
and burns, the floating bridge,
the city thick with distance.
Here in these verses is that mix of the wild and the changed in the living landscape that characterizes the Northwest today, a place where the natural is still within reach while development rushes ahead.
The rest of Lockwood’s strong debut is a feast of poems that are disparate in both form and subject matter. Some deal with questions of science, others with experiences of motherhood. One of my favorites is a long, segmented poem called “Love and the Crumb Girl” that links ideas about entropy with a young woman’s seemingly disordered life, weaving in relationships, the anxieties of youth, and even Greek mythology.
Deirdre Lockwood holds an MA in creative writing from Boston University and a PhD in oceanography from the University of Washington. Poems in her collection have appeared in noted journals such as The Threepenny Review, Yale Review, and Poetry Northwest. She is also a journalist and fiction writer.
An Introduction to Error is published by Cornerstone Press.
“A brainy, passionate, wildly original book; a primer for surviving, with love and courage, on a threatened planet.”
– Rosanna Warren, author of Hindsight
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Otter photo © Michael N. McGregor
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