Drinking the River

There is elemental life in David Polk’s poems, intimate moments when it seems our remove from the natural world—fatal to it—can be bridged. It is the poetry of that connection in daily life and the imagination. The great river floods, a blue wasp sails dreamlike through the house. Suddenly a copperhead lies snake-thick across the hiker’s path.
The poet’s “mind is at once local and transcendent in its reach,” says the writer William Benton, and “local” here means the western end of Kentucky where the continent’s four great rivers join.” The watershed’s birds and wildlife, too, are the book’s familiars.
The poems often slip seamlessly from narration to meditation. On the Ohio, which is immense here, the poet’s canoe gains “on a lily pad broken loose and beside it/ a mouse—pale belly up—no longer resisting/ the forward, the careless and incessant forward.”
The overall sequence of the book follows the seasonal recurrence, and gradually, as it unfolds, a life-span is implied. Most of the poems center on our relation to the natural world; the poet’s responses to it surprise and appeal. Yet there are those too that explore the world of the poet’s family and other loves.