And We Are Left to Hear It Leave

A Review of Bill Carty’s We Sailed on the Lake

In his second collection, We Sailed on the Lake, Bill Carty forms an urgent argument for our fragile world, leading us through beauty and anguish, providing consolation amid desolation.  Every poem bears a cruciality, an urgent observation about our impact on each other and the Earth. Carty plunges and meanders into the surreal and the material, writing within the domestic and towards the ecosystems of our planet. Throughout this collection, Carty considers how and why we make art and cultivate relationships as we hurtle through the ravages of the twenty-first century: 

                              as witness

                              suppose

I send my daughter from here

toward the year 2100 but can’t

by fiat grant her a moral life

it’s her birthday and each red dot

is where a bomb fell (“Whenever I’m in the Vicinity” (47-8)

In this poem, the past surges within the present, allowing culpability, regret, and solastalgia (existential duress caused by climate change) to surface. “Whenever” focuses on Carty’s themes of climate dread, poetics, politics, guilt, and kinship. It considers what humans owe each other and the planet—call that morality or, as Carty suggests, duty: 

you wake

determined to walk the whole jetty

and bring a scrap of Lispector

the terrible duty is to go to the end

which seems a bit vivid

so you check . . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

where you lived and learned

how climate might make a place

                                       history (“Whenever” 45)

Reading Carty, we are guided from the enormous to the minute and vice versa. Near the conclusion of “Whenever,” Carty telescopes from Wordsworth to the Pentagon, then down to a bee. These variations in scale allows Carty to consider the enormous force of collective humanity in observations of climate change throughout the collection and in metonyms like “the Pentagon.” But Carty also considers the fragility of individuals, for example, the “hero in the kitchen / [who] scrolls financial records,” (46) or the speaker whose labor concludes “Whenever”: 

I’m on the set

I’ve made I

repair and fix

I repair and

fix and then

I take the blue tarpaulin away (53) 

There’s something forlorn in this collection, yet we are compelled towards its poems not only because the author evokes what we have lost and what is at stake but also because Carty’s speakers try to care for each other and the world. Nowhere is the attempt to live gently—to fix—more heartbreaking than in “Outer Lands.” This poem is set within an off-kilter natural world: “I was supposed to be in the mountains / but the mountains were on fire.” (6) To avoid fire and smoke, the speaker drives to the coast where he encounters a seal in distress. He tries to help, but he finds “increasingly, my efforts // bore the whiff not of science, / but of ritual.” (6) 

As the poem progresses, Carty buffets us from the shore where the mammal suffers to a phone screen in which the speaker watches sea mammal rescues. The poem’s devastating nadir is the speaker’s realization that this seal will not survive. It’s never clear if humans are directly implicated in this death. But the setting of the poem, within the smoke of the West’s ever increasing fires, suggests human culpability for even this small natural catastrophe. In the last lines, the speaker vows “never to touch another living thing / for fear of how my being human might kill it.” (8)

Carty grants poetic force to abstractions like culpability, oligarchy, and patriotism while showing us, via carefully crafted images, how terrible an abstraction can be when applied to a fragile body. For example, “Greenspan” considers (among other things) capitalism and its ruins, using as a central image a graph of economic performance, presumably a rising and falling wave. The poem begins: “Wanted something, lost it, / then found it in the yield curve.” (2) What Carty finds in the yield curve is “one lone drunk sipping / from the mermaid fountain, / dark rush of clocks // come to coerce evening.” (2) In “Greenspan,” Carty plots human lives against time’s coercion, while also making material, here in the form of a drunk, the real impact of the giant force of capitalism. 

This is typical of his work as is this moment later in the poem: “Orange vesters clog the path ahead. / To be safely seen or out to sell?” (2). We’re not sure who the orange vesters are, but we know that people wear orange vests for protection from accidents, for example when hunting or cycling. This image creates a complex dualism because the very people seeking safety in orange may be at another time (or at the very same time in the case of hunters) an agent of violence. 

Thus, “Greenspan” prompts us to consider ourselves as both agents and victims and also, through the figure of the yield curve, as consumed by and consumers of time and commerce. At the end of “Greenspan,” the speaker refuses to buy anything, seeming to want to opt out of this complexity, but then decides to buy some flowers: “Of course, // the answer’s always flowers.” (3)

The poems in We Sailed are often both tender and violent. The book’s longest poem, “A Row of Trees,” is a fragmentary walk, with a few stanzas (or one poem?) per page. In it, diverse scraps of text (from Hunt, Homer, Koi, and Larkin) intersect alongside musings about poetry and nature, “I know the risk you take / folding laundry in a yellow dress. // You fold some sunshine / in those clothes.” (72)

But much of the passion in this poem and this collection is associated with violence:

When I was stabbed I carried 

the knife inside me

the way some shot people

carry bullets. 

The way the poem carries

this worm inside it

inside it. (71)

Here, Carty identifies verse with violence, highlighting the paradox that humans as a species are both proactively violent and yet capable of great tenderness and care. Carty’s speakers try, as in “Outer Lands,” to lead a less harmful, maybe even helpful life. But a refrain of the unsolvable resounds—from the doomed seal in “Outer Lands” to the problem of a too-small trivet in “Domestics” where: “our mugs tottered over each long edge…. // but there was no balance point; this was a puzzle to live with, not solve.” (12)  

In a poem towards the end of the collection, “Genesis,” the subject seems first to be the band Genesis “playing at the pizza palace” but the poem progresses to meditate on the uncertain purpose of poetry and maybe life: 

I drew a dotted line

between

beginning and end

said something like

that’s where the poem exists

. . . . . . . .

impermanence being

the art’s chief function

because forever is scary (57)

“Forever is scary” indeed, but Carty’s work provides solace in articulated and shared anxiety and loss and at the same time, he grants us beauty’s rich consolations. In “Pears Poem,” as the speaker unpacks gold-foil wrapped fruit, we are asked to “imagine the moon in our kitchen” (28) and if we “mind it there.” (28) The poem concludes with a quiet “Thank you” (28) that feels as if it is for our attention. 

At a moment in which many writers are engaging with the concept of solastalgia, Carty’s book stands out in making a lyric consideration of culpability and agency while sharing the glorious ache of careful sight.