Bryan R. Monte
AQ42 Spring 2025 Book Reviews
Philip Gross, The Shores of Vaikus, Bloodaxe Books, 2024, ISBN 978-1-78037-717-9, 95 pages.
Jean Huets, At the Fall Line, Getrude M Books, 2024, ISBN 978-1-939530-30-1, 308 pages.
Sometimes the old adage, ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover’ just isn’t true. It certainly isn’t the case with Philip Gross’s new poetry book, The Shores of Vaikus, (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) nor with Jean Huet’s, At the Fall Line, (Gertrude M Books, 2024). The first book is a collection of poems and parables inspired by Gross’s father’s Estonian homeland. Its front cover features a panoramic view of the shore at Kasmir, Estonia. Prominent in this photo on the front cover are two erratic boulders, smoothed by being rolled hundreds of miles by glaciers and then deposited as these retreated and melted: a brilliant, geologic metaphor for the poetic process. On the back cover is distant, low shore with uniformly thick forests across a bay. The second is about the emotional, social, and economic tensions experienced by former Union officer, Louis Bondurant, who returns to Richmond, Virginia, (once the Confederate States of America’s capital), after the American Civil War. He finds himself in love with a married woman, and the poorly-paid foreman of a granite quarry his family formerly owned. Its cover features Winslow Homer’s dark, moody almost expressionist Moonlight on the Water, which, in just a few strokes, (to me) suggests two women by a river.
However, The Shores of Vaikus is not only a beautiful object, but also a masterful collection of poems. Its first and last sections, entitled ‘Translating Silence’, consist of ‘free verse’ poems, in which Gross explores the dichotomies of the natural, political, and social worlds: at home and in exile, presence and absence, sounds and silence. In the second section, entitled ‘Evi and the Devil’, are 214 Grimm’s Fairy tale-like (the more adult, unexpurgated, violent versions) prose poems about the origins of the evil and the dark reality of the natural world.
The book’s primary focus, as the cover and the book’s dedication reveals, is the poet’s father’s Estonian homeland. The first poem, ‘The Old Country’, takes up themes which will be examined throughout the book. It emphasizes the sounds, nature, and geography of this part of the world:
The storm moved over last night
letting the sea down again, the Baltic flatness
slightly darkened, with a battered look,
Gross’s attention is also drawn to small details, which makes these poems memorable. He mentions ‘The honey-tart tang of pine sap’ and, in the next stanza, observes ‘…this year’s new wasp/bent to it diligence, scraping a track in the wood’
He also mentions its cumulative effect on one’s memory:
So little can stand for so much: that
sound for log pile, for resin smell, for morning
after, for that old, small country.
which he compares to how a “deep-dive camera’s eye/might catch a hundred-year-old-wreck’. Another poem, ‘Introits’, has images of contradiction and coexistent (im)possibilities symbolized by ‘…a bronze axe / thrown into forever / only yesterday / four thousand years ago.’
There are also poems about the emigrant experience, the present absences in their lives and what they’ve left and will never return to even if it is the same place, because time changes everything and you’re not there to change with it. It is certainly a sentiment I can relate to having spent nearly half my life on a different continent from the one on which I was born
His poems also address the effect the individual has on history:
as a surfer on ocean waves if one is lucky, or deformed and and/or crushed by the cruel, sharp tectonic shifts of history (as strong as the glaciers that rolled those erratic boulders hundreds of miles smooth) if one isn’t:
rather than
in the gunmetal neighbours
brooding on the brittleness
of empires how their fractured
edges can be honed
to lacerate, that we are in the grip
of larger shifts and flows than us
is no surprise.
The middle section of The Shores of Vaikus, entitled ‘Evi and the Devil’, is composed of 48 pages of 214 paragraph-long prose poems. In first sections, Evi, the main character, introduces herself by saying ‘When I was small, I ran away into the forest’. In the next section she seems to implicate herself as an arsonist: ‘Some mornings we found there had been another of those unexplained house fires at night.’ We also meet her relatives: her strict grandmother who frightens her, her uncle, who disappears in a latched (locked?) sauna, whom she reports was ‘Dissolved completely, just a puff of uncle-scented steam’ when she unlocked the door, a wicked great-grandfather who her urges her to ‘Show ’em, girl, and don’t waste a stick of your tinder.’ Another victim is her teacher, Mrs. Tamm.
‘Every now and then, I broke a teacher. No harm meant, you under-
stand. They were all two shrill, too brittle, the might shatter, splinters
everywhere, people had to warned.
Evi broke the teacher by constantly looking over and above Mrs. Tamm’s shoulder, as if someone was behind the teacher. Evi reports: ‘she broke. Mind you, all the grownups felt like that in those days.’ perhaps an echo of Soviet surveillance culture.
Evi also encounters a hermit, who comes to a bad end after Evi mentions the effluent emanating from his toilet outflow pipe which makes the forest and the town stink. To rectify this, the hermit seals off the pipe, but he soon suffocates from his own toxic waste. (I guess he hadn’t heard of compost toilets or privies.)
And of course, since these are fairy tale-like vignettes, the forest, trees, lakes, streams, and wind all have special powers—and Evi knows them. For example, she knows that ‘sudden round clearings in the forest…where the Devil squats, grandly to fart. Things wither’ She also sees ‘the dead unpeel the papery crust of non-existence, and step blinking into the sun.’ a very adept and rather novel description of resurrection. Here, Evi has many recurring encounters with the Devil as well as the Crane Beak Woman and the Glass Man.
Sometimes these tales touch very close to historical and contemporary reality. For example, invasions of this flat land by the Vikings—‘First it was the raiders landing in their thin boats with their hungry disposition’, the Nazis “some terrible blond people … with ideals and uniforms and a loathing of darkeness. The blonder they got, the darker the shadows behind them.’, and the Soviets, ‘The isle is full of notices, curt words explaining that the place beyond this point is not. Wires, suddenly, taut as zithers. Some hum.’—are all mentioned. (The last poem’s reference in particular to: ‘the place / beyond this point is not’ reminded me of a central East Berlin tourist map I purchased there in 1978. Where the Wall stood, was just a blank, white space at the edges of the map, as if there was also nothing there.) This collection of Estonian fairy tale-like micro prose poems create their own world and should spark the imagination of readers of any age.
The third section of The Shores of Vaikus, Gross explores the meanings of the Estonian word viakus in English. In fact, four of the five poems in this section have the word vaikus in their titles. The first poem, ‘Now in Vaikus’ explains how the history and landscape are interrelated, how they lead to what was (and for some larger countries still is), ‘A landscape hard to defend,’ which lead to it being contested and conquered by ‘Finnish, Russians, Swedish, (and) Germans’ armies, but is also still a favourite place for ‘migrating birds…in the reed beds’. However, Gross describes how easy it is to hide in the Estonian countryside:
Even in a tiny country
There’s a kind of a forest that goes on forever.
You drive for an hour
on a straight road, straight and flat.
You will never reach a rise to see beyond.
The next poem, ‘A Monument in Vaikus’ describes the Occupation Memorial in Maarjamaë, Tallinn, composed of ‘two walls / of glass black marble…(in) A trench’ similar in design to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Near the close of this poem, the poet admits:
I can’t conceive of music
it would be more right to sound here
than to stand
without a note
A few lines later, he admits that he seeks ‘To write some bars / of that un-music / but in words. The impossibility of describing human history and suffering in mere words.
Next ‘Five Versions of Vaikus’ are a set of five short poems about the different types of Estonian silence. Valgus vaikus is a light silence, sipelgat vaikus is ant silence. jänesekapse vaikus is rabbit cabbage silence, hanede vaikus is geese silence, and vaikiminie is silence itself. Gross uses metaphors from the natural world to describe each of these unique silences. These are also possibly linked to his spiritual practice as a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which encounters God or wisdom in mystical silence. The book ends with ‘Another Shore’, with the poet observes with pleasure the aerial acrobatics of a swifts (in the UK?) in ‘the late July evening’ as they ‘cut through’ (the sky)…‘polishing the edges of space, with finer, finer abrasions.’
Jean Huets’sAt the Fall Line is also a handsome book that is propelled by the twists and turns of intrigue, where enemies ultimately turn out to friends, and vice versa. It revolves around Louis Bondurant, a civil war veteran living in his hometown, Richmond, Virginia, as he seeks love, justice, a place for himself to start over again. The novel’s action is illuminated throughout by passages from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and is a real page turner, depicting the difficult transformation of a Southern society in transition. For example, it describes how some former slaves now work as servants in their former masters’/mistress’s houses, while others leave for out West to homestead. War veterans, most with some sort of physical and mental disabilities, are scattered about town. Some are drunks, some mental wrecks, and almost all are finding it hard to adjust to life after their home region’s defeat. In addition, most of At the Fall Lines’s action, (with the exception of the short epilogue) takes place from February to October 1869, giving the narrative a compressed, tense feeling. Huets also contrasts Bondurant’s life in Richmond with that of his younger brother’s in New Haven, (Bondurant moved his family North to New England during the war), where he studies at Yale.
The novel begins with an outing to a quarry, into which the Bondurant’s love interest’s niece falls to her death. This tragedy sets the tone for the rest of the novel in which Bondurant struggles to regain the quarry, which was stolen from his father through financial chicanery, while painfully navigating the world as a disabled veteran. For Bondurant, who was shot in the hip in a battle, walking and transport by horseback and carriage is difficult and painful. He also experiences episodes of PTSD, which are just as vividly described as Stephen Crane’s battlefield scenes, and survives an assassination attempt by an unknown assailant. It also includes realistic, but non-pornographic, references to clandestine love making, a prelude to gunfight that the protagonist defuses, and Richmond residents’ persistent prejudices and problems that have survived the war’s monumental bloodshed. Huets’s extensive research at local, state, and national libraries and archives, plus her interviews with Paul Wood, author of Tools and Machinery of the Granite Industry, brings to life the world of her characters, making At the Fall Line’s relations, situations, and conflicts truly engaging. AQ