Magellan’s
Reveries
By
R. Nemo Hill
Dos
Madres Press
Loveland,
Ohio
ISBN:
978-1-948017-23-7
83
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Perhaps
life’s never-ending voyage? Perhaps the tidal pull of infinity?
Perhaps an ekphrastic exercise of love? R. Nemo Hill retells the tale
of Magellan’s first circumnavigation of our world with formalist
elegance through the swells and troughs of rolling consciousness. He
matches up each poem with a seascape photograph. There are 33 of each
and the photographs are gorgeous. The resulting dual sequence
astounds beyond marvelous.
Explorers
require certain traits for their livelihoods: courage, imagination,
self-assuredness, determination, faith in their God and/or
themselves. The package most often includes a much darker side.
Historically, many of them were colonizers, tyrannical leaders,
slavers, and aficionados of greed. Humankind is nothing if not a
repository of Manichean complexity. Magellan certainly qualified as a
member and even an exemplar of that brotherhood.
Turned
down by the king of Portugal, Magellan depends on the financial
backing of the Spanish king. His primary mission is to find a
westward route to the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) and Asia in
general. He commands five ships with 270 men. The epic journey is
fraught with terrible storms, mutiny, scurvy, desertion, and a
pitched battle in the Philippines. Only 18 sailors return with their
one remaining ship. Magellan doesn’t make it.
Hill
calls his poems reveries and gives them a dream-like texture. He
chooses the ghazal as his poetic form. Within the last two lines of
each ghazal the speaker, in this case Magellan, embeds a signature
into the piece. This works wonderfully for Hill, effectively
cementing the narrator’s persona with the protagonist-explorer.
All
the potential inherent in his coming adventure Magellan sees clearly.
The Fourth Reverie of Magellan ends this way,
Land
of Fire. White Bay. Bay of Toil.
Cape
Desire. We name what we can’t hold.
Five
pitch black caravels, five hundred tons
afloat,
white sails, alone, ablaze—Behold!
With
neither moon nor stars, the Hand of God
cannot,
tonight, know how much dark it holds.
Wrapped
in sailcloth, lashed to lead and prayer--.
Now
whisper:
‘what the
sea takes,
let
the sea hold.’
Taste
the wind, Magellan! Breathe the blast!
It’s
asking—How much can the future hold?
Well,
the future holds quite a bit for Magellan and his fellow travelers,
both sailors and those harriers of consciousness, Hill and his
readers. The poet, in fact, makes this a voyage of enlightenment,
where Magellan and Hill both transcend themselves and ride the waves
together as their fates unravel.
From
desperate storm to desperate storm, tension building, Magellan’s
crews fight their way forward through the South Atlantic. The
flagship Victoria becomes almost a mystical symbol. Hill imagines the
scene,
All
night, on deck, blind watchmen lost beneath
capotes
do mar,
blue cloaks, blue capes of storm.
Our
bloodied iron hooks tore tasteless flesh.
The
ring of sharks could not contain the storm.
Strike
each sail! Strip each trembling spar!
A
sailor casts no shadow in a storm.
Which
unseen, on board saint is this
Who
closes the invisible gates of storm?
A
plume of fire, Magellan? A covenant?
Victoria’s
mast, a candle in the storm?
Asea,
the world looks different, is different. Ships become islands of
solidity. Everything else exhibits constant change, breeds illusion.
Men see what they want to see. In the opening of The Tenth Reverie of
Magellan the poet explains,
Bellowed
out by surf there is an island.
Sailors,
plug your ears! There is no island.
Why
do we call it Earth instead of Ocean?
Do
we dream these whitecapped waves are windward islands?
The
weakest lie on deck all night, and count:
two
luminous clouds, a billion brilliant islands.
Hill
outdoes himself with a dramatic description of Magellan’s last
stand. Metaphysical imagery and the ghazal’s insistent repetition
work wonders. This scene in the Twenty-First Reverie is my favorite,
Low
tide. Our longboats languish far from shore.
My
senses dive, though into shallows dropped.
‘Knee
deep in blood, beset on every side,
not
once, but twice the Captain’s helmet dropped.’
Red
brine fountain of my limb-lopped trunk,
Flush
these breakers as they crest and drop!
I
am the coral cave where the wronged Christ rots.
I
am the cross from which the downed Christ drops.
Two
pylons dream a gateway underwater.
A
rising bridge is now a bridge that drops.
You
still have eyes, Magellan? Witness then
how
every fragment of the shattered drops.
After
Magellan’s death in battle, he continues in the third section as a
somewhat altered narrator. Hill’s own voice, speaking through him,
becomes stronger and both voices merge into a more cosmic (read
oceanic) consciousness. The Twenty-Fourth Reverie describes in
evocative language the post-battle scene as Magellan’s sailors
consolidate their force by destroying one of their own ships,
Bright
feathers fall, I float through, as I turn.
From
nothing into nothingness, I’m turned.
Conception
will burn! In polished seaglass,
gulls
of far-flung flame will wheel, and turn.
What
shapes of scuttled ships, of men unloved,
complete
these clouds behind me when I turn?
Rage
once bade fling my useless maps
into
the sea—not knowing where to turn.
Magellan is
reviled by most of his surviving crew and the Spanish king after the
completion of his epic voyage. Then the official chronicler of the
voyage finally makes his report and the explorer’s side of the
story gets out. Acclamation follows. But this hardly matters to the
poet. Magellan’s victory, as related by Hill, has become another
thread in mankind’s complex tapestry, a tapestry stretched into a
map of unconscious beauty and intrepid, timeless spirit.
Between
the disarming visuals and the verbal variations I know of no better
introduction to humanity’s unknowable spin and orientation than
this collection of exploration reveries. R. Nemo Hill has stretched
his poetic anchor line.
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