NEIL LEADBEATER Reviews
The Cataracts by Raymond
McDaniel
(Coffee
House Press, Minneapolis, 2018)
Born in
Florida, Raymond McDaniel is the author of three previous volumes of poetry – Murder (a Violet) (2004); Saltwater Empire (2008); and Special
Powers and Abilities (2013) –all published by Coffee House Press. He
graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1995 with an MFA where
he currently teaches at the Sweetland Center for Writing. He is also a regular
reviewer for The Constant Critic. I had the pleasure of reviewing two of his
previous collections for Galatea
Resurrects in 2015.
“Like
everyone,” McDaniel reflects, “I could dream before I could see.” In The
Cataracts, “the dream and the sight are the same.” This is a book about blindspots and insights.
McDaniel was just ten years old when his father, who was a draftsman, underwent
cataract surgery and so a part of this book is about vision and what enables or
complicates it and how it affects our take on the world. Optical imagery
permeates the text in a variety of forms. Sometimes it is technical with
references to terms such as an “optical encephalogram” in Five Million Years to Earth or the constituent parts of the human
eye reeled off in this line from Tertullian:
“(the cornea the retina, the iris the choroid the optic nerve)” and at other
times it is non-technical with frequent repetitions of the words “sight”,
“sightless”, “blind”, “blur” etc. There is also the imagery of darkness and
light and the use of common idiomatic expressions such as “keeping one’s eye on
the ball.”
McDaniel is a
master of wordplay. The experience of
having a cataract and misreading words as a consequence is aptly conveyed in
the frequent linkage of words that look alike but have different meanings:
“buff / bluff,” “haven / heaven,” “version / vision,” “curves / cures,”etc.
McDaniel also juxtaposes words that are so close in meaning that they
can be hard to tell apart: “gleam, glint, glimmer, glitter, glisten, glister,
glass, glaze.” The same tactic is
employed in relation to the juxtaposition of words that are spelt the same but
have different meanings such as “mine / mine,” “well / well” and “soap opera /
washing soap.” All these examples are
the lexical equivalents of optical illusions.
The word “stupid” and variations on it, such as “stupidly” and
“stupidity” appear at various intervals to remind us that we are indeed stupid
to take everything at face value, to believe in everything we see.
Vision is
described in various ways: it is all about the things we see or think we see
and the things we do not see. In “Sidewinder” it is about movement that we
catch for a second from the corner of the eye and in “Claire Lenoir” it is a
camera that records our last moments:
…the natural fact of a photographic film
of the cause of death peeled from the lenses
of the dead…
Sometimes it
is insight, the act of knowing something rather than actually seeing it (you cannot see without / without seeing
within) and sometimes it is the realisation that we all see things
differently, not just in terms of shade and colour, but also with regard to
perspective.
Careful,
reasoned argument in response to questions of a philosophical nature is
expressed in poetry that is immediately accessible and follows a pattern of
linear progression. It marks a stylistic shift from some of his earlier work. Some
of the questions are huge such as McDaniel’s consideration of the soul that is
never seen and yet is everywhere.
Strip these
poems back to their bare bones and it is fascinating to see how McDaniel builds
them up from the base. His sources are many and varied: stories from the Bible
(both the Old and the New Testaments), feature films, televised adaptations of
novels, folktales, art works and literature. His wide reading and obvious
interest in all the art forms is made manifest in the rich tapestry of his work.
Stylistically, the collection contains many different forms of free verse
poetry with varying line and stanza breaks. Some poems take the form of
narratives that extend over several pages and contain long lines that move from
the colloquial to the poetic while others are briefer with correspondingly
shorter lines.
McDaniel. through
subtle phraseology, can even make us think of different situations from the
ones he is writing about. In Destiny and
Mystique, for example, the phraseology employed in such fragments as
Are
you a boy or
a
girl are you a boy or a girl
and
are
you a lefty or a righty
a
lefty or a righty
and
OK
are they good guys or bad guys
are
they good or are they bad
echo an
optician testing lenses against the eye: “Is it clearer now or is it clearer
now…Now or now?”
For me,
the four poems central to this collection are “Blind Man’s Bluff”, a good
example of the way in which McDaniel tells us a story and then uses and
broadens that story to expound on a point of philosophy; “Cataracts” in which a
very moving account is given of his father’s admission to hospital for cataract
surgery; “Five Million Years to Earth” a
re-telling of the film adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s novel which takes in the
long perspective of history and “This
is Going to Hurt,” in which McDaniel casts himself as a man “reporting from the
edge of the world” on intractable
problems and insoluble dilemmas imparting truths that are difficult to
swallow.
A key
theme that runs through this book is that of contradiction. We are contradicted
at every turn because nothing is as it seems.
Consider the poem titled “Madness to Believe”. The title suggests that what is to follow
will be of an existentialist nature but the first stanza turns this idea on its
head:
that
things happen
without
being made to happen –
madness to believe there is no maker
Later, in the
same poem, McDaniel observes that ocean rollers only look as if they are moving
slowly, if at all, when they are enormous and far away. Often, as McDaniel
hints at in “Descender” it is a matter of scale – of seeing things from afar
and of seeing things close up.
Nowhere
is the theme of contradiction made more explicit than in “Hothouse”
Rose is not rose nor violet violet nor jade jade.
But each is what it is, not what it seems.
What each seems is what each gets seen.
Though what we see isn’t the thing seen.
Another
key theme is that of concealment.
Consider the title “& Juliet” – a neat example of concealment if
ever there was one – and the poem “The Concealed” where veils and eyes are
inextricably linked – the seven veils of Salome and Galen’s description of the
eye as a series of tunicae or garments that are not of the same weight or color
or substance. Here, McDaniel shows his mastery in linking two separate
“stories” and reassembling them into something completely new.
Helpful
notes act as pointers at the end to assist those readers who wish to do some
research to enable them to more fully appreciate the context in which these
poems are set and to admire their artistic accomplishment.
The book
cover, designed by Sarah Evenson, could well be an artistic representation of
the text that accompanies McDaniel’s poem “Structural Color” and the way that
the letters are arranged could even pass for a Snellen Chart if it wasn’t for
the fact that the letters making up the word CATARACTS are all of the same size
but I suspect that this detail was deliberately overlooked for the sake of
clarity – readers must, after all, be able to read a book title clearly! As an
afterthought, I like the way ART is captured in the centre when the letters are
read vertically from top to bottom).
McDaniel
is not only a writer of great poetry but he is also a poet who shows compassion
for all living things. This generous collection of 58 poems shows us a poet who
is writing at the peak of his intellectual powers. The poems are
well-researched and deeply satisfying. New meanings reveal themselves at every
turn and, just when you think you have mined them for all their worth, there
are always more jewels to be found. Highly recommended.
*****
Neil Leadbeater is an author, essayist, poet and critic living
in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been
published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His books
include Librettos for the Black Madonna
(White Adder Press, 2011); The Worcester
Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The
Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014) and Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017).