Walter Donway's "Touched By Its Rays"

BOOK REVIEW: Walter Donway, Touched By Its Rays (Washington, DC: The Atlas Society, 2008), 113 pages (hardcover), $19.95.

April 2008 -- Reports of poetry’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Proof of life arrives afresh in Walter Donway’s exquisite new book, Touched By Its Rays.

The title is taken from a line in Atlas Shrugged : “. . .and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays . . .” These words splash across an opening page of this collection, and you understand immediately that this is a poet who means to aim high.

In the first poem, “A Prelude,” the poet imagines himself as a pagan Greek discus thrower who makes a point of declaring his allegiance to Apollo. Let me admit, I had to read this poem a couple of times before I quite got it, and that was partly because I didn’t remember something important about Apollo. I recalled immediately that he is the god of the sun, which connects us back to the book’s title. And I felt the tug of Nietzsche’s opposition of Apollo and Dionysus, where Apollo embodies the forces of rationality. All well and good. But it was only on the second reading that I remembered: Apollo is the god of poetry itself.

The discus thrower dreams of throwing his discus not merely far, but to distant lands and a future time, where it may leave an impression on someone:

      Though none recall the man, the deed, the time,

      A boy, just glancing up in future days,

      To read the hour in the sun's slow climb,

      May see my discus, flashing in its rays.

No real discus travels that kind of distance or time span. So we realize that we have entered the realm of the symbolic. That Apollonian thrower starts to resemble a poet, and the discus, “flashing in its rays,” starts to resemble one particular poetry book.

Donway recently spelled this out: “As I suggest in my initial poem in that book, ‘Prelude,’ perhaps some young person of real talent, and with a whole life ahead of him or her, will read my poems and envision what a great poet might accomplish in days ahead. That is one meaning of Touched By Its Rays.”

He fears that the true value of poetry is being buried alive in a blizzard—a blizzard of frequently indecipherable free verse. He hopes that his book can be a bit of countervailing sun, demonstrating the persistent power of the traditional way of composing English poetry. So he writes with meter, often with rhyme, and fashions his words with intelligence and passion.

He manages these methods with flexible aplomb. He is careful not to pursue musical effect at the expense of accurate meaning. As regards style, one gets the impression that he has studied the mature Yeats very carefully. The meter is mastered more than followed, the rhymes are often partial rather than full, and the line of thought is often densely packed, uncoiling from a tight grammatical spool as the poem plays out. His language shifts lightly between contemporary idiom and more classic modes of speech.

I did think I saw him lapsing into something resembling free verse, at least at first. Consider “Knowing You,” which begins with this stanza:

      I lift the blanket.

      Your skin feels like a gift warmed

      By the giver’s hands.

All of this poem’s stanzas look like this. Short line, long line, short line. Unrhymed, with no set rhythm other than the variation in line lengths. I didn’t get it on my first reading, but on my second it leapt out at me. The stanzas all follow the traditional form of Japanese haiku: five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. So I hadn’t caught him slipping into free verse after all!

“A Ghost at Yalta” might also sound a bit like free verse in places.

      Millions pushed across the map

      As though Versailles taught nothing;

      Elections hung on the pledge

      Of a power-mad tyrant;

But the overall effect of the poem is one of driving rhythm. It’s about the way Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin carved up Europe after World War II, and I would say it’s the angriest poem in the book. I wondered if the charge of negative feeling was resistant to the adornments of form. Or, to put it another way, just how pretty can a really angry poem be? Doesn’t the emotion naturally drag you toward somewhat dissonant effects?

One of my favorite poems from book sounds a lot like a song, and I hear that it started out as song lyrics, but was transmuted. It’s called “Viking Woman,” and the words belong to her:

      War god, why have you taken my love?

      You ever have craved the bravest one,

      Relished the defiant cry,

      Of him who would not run.

The poems cover a wide variety of subjects and have a pleasant quality of unpredictability. Walter Donway doesn’t write the same poem over and over. Each represents some new twist of thought. He doesn’t always come to a firm conclusion as a result of his explorations. Sometimes, the way a poem ends is not with a statement but with a question. “Just Wondering,” for example, is a humorous meditation on the current state of the mind/body debate. Are we merely computers made of meat, as many materialists would have it, or is there something more substantial to the notion of human spirit? It ends like this:

      But would a trillion bytes of stuff,

      All syncopating, be enough

      To swirl around the letters here

      And feel a moment’s hope or fear?

Two longer works deserve special discussion.

“Naked” is a short play in verse. In technical terms, I would say it’s a “closet drama,” not designed for full-scale staging but amenable to public reading by actors. This form has a long lineage in poetry and includes Goethe’s Faust and Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Donway’s drama centers on Juliette Justine, a proud and beautiful actress who has been turned upon by the public, the press, and a corrupted justice system. As the action opens, she is exiting her limousine and being walked into prison. A troubadour is present, out of his proper place and time, and he sings:

           It's morning in America

           Where free men have arisen

           To savor how a goddess

           Endures her walk to prison.

The play develops into an exquisitely bitter exploration of the strangely hysterical love/hate relationship that our public maintains with celebrities, loving to see them rise, but also loving to see them fall. It took my breath away.

The other longer work I want to discuss is “A Sense of Life.” With a title like that you might be expecting a philosophical treatise, but what you actually get is a compelling short story in verse, told in the one-sided conversational manner of Robert Browning’s soliloquies. It’s wartime, perhaps in Europe, and as the story opens, the owner of a house has captured an intruder:

      The girl—I’ll get to her—looked like a lad

      But for her breasts, and hips, perhaps: all bone

      And hair from eating only twice a week.

An intense relationship develops between the two when his imagination is captured by her beauty and bearing. He is a successful painter, but his canvases have turned “stiff and lifeless.” Now he is consumed by a passion to paint her nude.

      She said: “There’s someone I remind you of.”

      “Not someone, but a sense that I had once,

      A sense, a feeling for what life might hold.”

For him, the relationship, however brief, is redemptive, reawakening his lost artistic vision. The tale vividly illustrates the intimate link between love and art; both involve a sense of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes and feeling the world through someone else's heart.

Perhaps this is a good way to think of the experience of reading through this book of poetry. It’s a kind of adventuresome tour, drawing you into a world of thought and feeling that will feel both new but oddly familiar. New, because he has thought things you have not. Oddly familiar, because he has named things, things you have felt, that you have not seen named before.

The book ends poignantly with “The Woods,” a brooding visit in the imagination to a “boyhood spot.” The book, and the poem, close like this:

      Ah, now I think I can recall:

      I heard soft voices all around,

      Though sad, and far, as taking leave—

      And then I heard no one at all.

It has been a long time since I enjoyed a new book of poetry this much. Walter Donway has tossed his discus high and far. I can only hope that Touched By Its Rays is seen, and read, by lovers of poetry around the world.

And if by chance you only “sort of like” poetry, I recommend it to you as well. Relentlessly intelligent, contemporary in language and topic, Donway brings the music of words boldly up to date for the twenty-first century.

Editor’s note: Walter Donway is a trustee of The Atlas Society and has contributed poetry to the pages of The New Individualist. His book, Touched By Its Rays, is published by The Atlas Society.

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