PETER MLADINIC – Hobbs, NM, USA

The Five Senses, a review of Resurrection River by Anthony Watkins. The University Press. Oxford Square-on-Thames, Alexandria. 2024. $11.00 paper.

The five senses are fully engaged. Resurrection River evokes a sensual world of particular people, places, and things. Its underlying message—the greatest mystery is the human body—Resurrection River evokes what we have and what we’ve had and have no longer, a world of love and loss, of the corporeal and the possible. Many of these poems tell good stories; a few of these poems ask big questions.  Three concerns are acceptance, resistance, and fate.  Accept things as they are, resist things are they are, ponder the how and why of things as they are—the poems seem to say.   

These poems reveal an acceptance of free will, of good and evil, of other opposites, and the gray area that falls in between opposites such as doubt and certainty, an acceptance of perplexity. “Quail in the Sunlit Window” invites perplexity. About hunting, it starts with an image of the dead. “The quail lay on the dressing shelf/ of the mudroom waiting/ to be plucked and cleaned.”  The irony is the ones waiting are the ones who shot the quail. “Dressing shelf” suggests ritual, that quail hunting is done more than once, with deliberation, to clean, cook, and eat the quail. The speaker sets himself apart from the hunters.  He reflects on treks in the woods as a boy, “never shooting anything accept a snake now and then.”  

There’s no contradiction between animal loving and hunting. Rather, “the sight and sound of a covey of quail flushed” and the delicious taste of cooked quail are emphasized.  In “Writing Prompts, or Stanton” the speaker sets himself apart from writers who “like writing prompts.”  Letting the topic reveal itself, he accepts himself.  “I’m as likely to write about how a paper cup goes in a trash can as not.”  He places this cup in the context of anecdotes about his cousin and teachers he had at school, and comes back to “the sound of those pointed paper cups/ whapping into one another,/ as the last drop of water weighed them into place.”  Not only the acceptance of self but also of others is revealed in  “The Lake Lays Long and Silver,” a poem about fishing and companionship. Towards the end of this narrative the speaker comments on their catch of bluegills.   

You start the motor and we head back to the dock,

98 eating size, that’s almost the bag limit between us. 

I clean and scale while you put away the gear

and rinse the boat.

After you tote the motor to the shed,

you help me finish the cleaning  

        

Resist things as they are.  Watkins’ themes  are universal and his settings are local.  “When Jesus Walked Across the Mississippi” exemplifies strong resistance to racism.  The poem stems from a childhood memory of watching Black workers in a field “steadily chopping/ with heavy hoes” in a segregated South.  The speaker’s awareness of “separate and unequal” is accented by his reference to “a white man’s Jesus” and “a Black Jesus.”  Watkins equates the killing of Christ with the murder of a seven year old Black boy who 

…found his strength 

to reach the end of the row

to reach the end of the day 

to reach the end of life

when a bullet cut down

his freedom and he laid

like a brown bodied Jesus

in the delta mud

The poem shows the hypocrisy of people who love God and hate their fellow humans.  Resist evil seems the poem’s underlying message. Resistance to limitations brought about by aging is suggested in “From Here.” “Just Out of Sight” resists forgetting the past by remembering and writing. “Drawing Pictures of Hot Rods” resists conformity. And “deadduckjesusheavenland TM” resists dogma.  The poet’s urging people to question comes across through comic hyperbole. “But who is to say what there is to a duck’s afterlife/ did a little duck jesus come long ago/ and die for the whole of the duck race?”  

A superficial reading would interpret Watkins’ satire for irreverence. It is anything but.  He urges readers to resist dogma and to question matters of life and death and fundamental beliefs.   

A third concern is fate. Watkins wonders about circumstances that result in individuals doing certain things at particular times, in particular places. What brought me here? His fate-based poems seem to ask.  In “Elm Street, Hattiesburg, Mississippi” his speaker says, “I got to wash my face/ And the world had changed/ My aunt and uncle had gone/ Moved to Indiana forever.”  Did they choose to move? Did they have to move?  Why Indiana?  The speaker focuses on the comfort and joy of being on Elm Street with his aunt and uncle. “And a gentle gas fireplace/ Flickering as we played/ Scrabble into the evening.”  Two other fate-based poems are side by side, “I Was Once a Painter” and “Tonight I Do.”  An opposite of sorts to the Hattiesburg poem, “Sunday Morning Storm” is about people forced to move, by circumstances beyond their control.  Watkins describes what they had been doing before being caught unawares by nature. “Mama and her mama were in the barn/ milking the cow./ Her papa was at the kitchen table/ studying his sermon.”  Then they were not.  The poem begins with the aftermath of “the storm of ‘38.”

You can tell by the way the trees grow

this was a homestead 

if you look through the thicket

you can still see the steps leading to nowhere

and a little further in, 

the crumbling bricks of a fallen chimney.

While the speaker’s mother and her mother did not lose their lives, they lost everything in the way of worldly possessions in the storm.   

Resurrection River is very much about what is found, reclaiming people, places and things passed through remembering and writing, and conjuring memories readers relate to.  When that coned paper cup lands in the wastebasket in the writing prompts poem, a body sees, hears and feels it. And feels the worm squiggle on the hook in the lake poem, with its intimacy, camaraderie, and harmony. In Resurrection River there is strife, trouble, and death. But also, life, hope, and joy of solitude and of being with others—conveyed in poems down-to-earth and elegant.  Written for pleasure and because they had to be, they are well worth reading. In Resurrection River, Anthony Watkins says things only he can say, in a voice that respects nature and dignifies our being here.

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Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, Voices fromt the Past, is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.

Read more from Peter Mladinic here.