The Truth About Ed Meek’s Spy Pond By Teisha Dawn Twomey

The Truth About Ed Meek’s Spy Pond

By Teisha Dawn Twomey

In his book “The Triggering Town,” Richard Hugo advises those seeking advice on writing, “you owe reality nothing and the truth about your feeling everything.” What Ed Meek accomplishes in his skillfully  crafted and well-seasoned collection “Spy Pond” is to connect his reader to intellectual and emotional matters in an honest, candid manner that engages us in their universality. In this way, he provides his reader with an unbounded versatility of mind that becomes the doorway into the more collective conscience. Meek preoccupies our mind with both the supernatural and natural, personal, national, and worldwide disasters, matters of our mortality, it’s heaviness but also it’s fragility, the revenge exacted by a forsaken ecosystem, the justice system, science and technology, and the lingering sense that we will feel comforted, if not by understanding, then through ascribing meaning to the issues that most trouble us.

At times, Meek’s poems express feelings of modern day ennui and a dissatisfied posture regarding the experience of the self in an indifferent world. “Spy Pond” has a willingness to ask the difficult questions and to point out the indifferent and the dishonorable, as if to shake the bored suburbanite out of his or her self-indulgent languor. This poet blows the lid off the suffering and pain of his fellow man, unafraid to strike the bone of contention in this nation. He makes it impossible to ignore or dehumanize the victim. The guilt and lingering sense that life is far more unfair to some, is an issue the reader must cope with, at least while reading. How we each begin to reconcile with this realization (or perhaps the powerful reminder) in the aftermath, is our business, but the author lays all of his own cards on the table and calls a spade a spade. 
 

Ed Meek’s “Spy Pond” speak it’s own truth, candidly and with determination. It has great compassion, limiting judgement or pretense by, instead, asking empathetic questions and allowing the reader space to come to their own conclusions. The author’s willingness, or rather determination, to take risks is beautifully captured in this brave and contemplative collection of poems. The fact that the aha-moments of Meek’s disclosures allow us to feel as if we have arrived at these crisp and concise moments of sudden epiphany naturally, is not a mistake. It is due to Meeks perceptively unpretentious and candid voice, that he is so successful embracing the reader and that as the collection develops or rather unfolds, the hidden truths we uncover feel like our own. 
 

“Spy Pond” is full of sharp wit and the words clearly demonstrate a profound understanding about what it is that we all care about, what compels each of us. Meek's poems never bite off more than they can chew, nor do they hit the reader over the head with a point too many times. Instead, a newcomer to the knowledge Meek presents, is extended with a manner of discerning foresight, that leaves the reader with the sense that the poet is not overly concerned with whether or what the reader does or does not know. Instead, Meek’s collection creates the impression that the writer has trusted the reader, assuming that he or she has enough good sense and to fill in any gaps and/or read between the lines to reach their own thoughtful conclusions. The failing to leave well enough alone and to instead go overboard overexplaining, as if trying to persuade the readers of some allusion, is an ailment many novice writers suffer from. If left unidagnosed and untreated, what would otherwise be successful work is destroyed by it’s very own lack of faith. In contrast, Meek has a distict gift for appearing to cinch the right words the first time through and leaving an impression that delivers his reader towards their significance and the consequences thereof. This, of course, is done by virtue of our own lens of perception, which is at all times at the mercy of context. Invariably our frame of reference will effect how each of us interprets Meek’s poetry. This inner-toolbox, that defines everything we think we know, will vary, as will our ability to expand our perceptions and elevate our understanding towards more meaning and purpose. It is this, in the end, that makes “Spy Pond” or any other successful work of literary art great; it’s ability to give birth to new or reawakened truths.


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Teisha Dawn Twomey is the poetry editor at Night Train, as well as an associate fiction editor for Wilderness House Literary Press. She received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous print and online poetry reviews and journals. By day, she is the Resource Specialist at Springfield College's Boston campus and by night she wishes she was a superhero.

Teisha Dawn Twomey is the poetry editor at Night Train, as well as an associate fiction editor for Wilderness House Literary Press. She received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous print and online poetry reviews and journals. By day, she is the Resource Specialist at Springfield College's Boston campus and by night she wishes she was a superhero.