The Groundswell Moving
David Robertson
Branton Press, 2021
The Groundswell Moving, winner of the Branton New Voices Prize, sees David Robertson tell the story of his family in terms both celebratory and elegiac. Though the poems are “personal,” Robertson’s method tends toward the expansive, using family relationships as a bridge to broader topics of history, politics, and the human condition. The opening poem, “When We Went Over Bridges,” for instance, begins with a childhood car ride in New Jersey before launching the reader into World War II:
Mother used to take us over to Jersey in the winter,
Katherine and I, wrapped in horse blankets
Daddy brought back from France.
My sister and I rode in the rumble seat
sitting on a bear coat.
And whenever we reached the tops of bridges,
I thought we were going to fall.
That was my fear and the houses below looked so little
I thought they would fit in my hands.
An uncle went to France.
He never said how many people he killed.
He told us about the hospital in Belgium
where the little girl came with her mother
and sang to the wounded in a jeweled soprano
so many years and that voice
still cuts gossamers in his heart.
The poem crosses over and back between the child’s hand-held world and the Odyssey-like memories of the uncle, a link, imaginatively established, between domestic initimacies and the realities beyond them.
In other poems, Robertson expands the private “I” to the “we” of the political moment. “In a Later Time” begins:
We are no longer the mobs
who buy sausage from the vendors,
crying out for Barabbas, and spill our wine
when the earth trembles.
The years of schooling have taught us
the eagle will always rend the lamb,
that the legions will always pillage;
but also, that new hearths will burn
and daughters will be born to tend its flame
and sons will be born to grow old by it.
We know the clouds will lower only to depart,
that lightning only follows its ancient paths
through the unharmed air.
This rolling, baroque rhetoric would not be out of place in John Webster. After a meditation on the nature of war and peace, the poem ends with a bang:
And so, as the lights go on
and the table is set and the conversation turns
from talk of innocent parades and imminent reforms,
turns to vintages and fashions,
to what the dancer said to the king,
to the latest reports of distant carnage or advice
to the amateur gardener on pruning both roots and twigs
we are left here, Pontius Pilates, taken to drink,
with smoothed-over dreams, and tailored sleeves…
that only monuments will remember,
that only the dust retrieves.
As Robertson moves different personas, bringing back echoes from across time and space, he continues to return to, as he phrases it in his preface, “the theme of connectedness: its dissappearance, its possibility.” Poetry, for Robertson, is a social fact, the colloquy between our public postures and intimate selves. Character after character, in The Groundswell Moving, is encountered as one might encounter a stranger, there in all of their singularity, interrogated, sympathized with, and, lastly, drawn into a deeper intimacy. This is a tender and exhilerating first book.