Poet David Dodd Lee’s new collection “The Bay” dives deep into the landscapes and emotional undercurrents of the Great Lakes. Writer Cal Freeman takes a closer look at Lee’s latest work.
Poet and visual artist David Dodd Lee is a Michigan ex-pat living and teaching in Indiana, and his latest collection of poems, "The Bay," is replete with references to his time in the mitten state. I do dream my way / back to Lake Michigan / sometimes, the ponds in the dunes, / above which float nighthawks / in summer, he writes. But if these poems are at times nostalgic, they are unsentimental in their rendering of nostalgia. Part of what makes this poet great is sensibility; Dodd Lee has too much of that splenetic existentialism about him (think Diane Seuss and Charles Baudelaire) to subject his reader to the trite affirmational tropes that seep into so much of our contemporary poetry. His writing is alive, even when it is about dying, engaging with the high and the low, switching modalities and moods seamlessly. Here we encounter phenomenology and classical philosophy, Bachelard and Aristotle, as well as Midwestern dive bars in winter. Water, as one might expect, is a frequent theme, but these poems are too dynamic to merely give us what we expect.
The bay of the title is Baugo Bay in the St. Joseph River, and the titular poem, which informs us we cannot separate / from the / darkness / descending / over the bay… We are / contiguous with it. This long poem is a brilliant lyric highlighting both Dodd Lee’s keen observational ability and his ironic playfulness. This book is full of serious stuff that Dodd Lee refuses to take too seriously. He doesn’t shy away from finitude nor does he maunder over it. Sadness and hilarity, rather than being dichotomous states, are inextricable. Take this moment in the poem “Fur”: We were surveilled in / a dive bar last night in the middle of winter // by a carpenter ant who then fell into my / mug of beer…
The poems written during the pandemic elevate boredom to wondrousness. The cygnets Dodd Lee counts in the poem “Counting,” the muskrat and the camel crickets in “The Pandemic: A Mini Documentary,” the belted kingfisher he spots at the end of the dock, all attest to the power of the poetic imagination while gently mocking it. The camel crickets are beatniks who smoke cigarettes and listen to jazz. The imagination is wondrous in its ability to elevate us for a time, but it doesn’t spare us the physical and spiritual conditions evoked in poems like “Life Support” where the sucking / of nature’s universal heart is ominous rather than miraculous. Just think of having to listen to your heartbeat / all night and all the next day / while writing out a grocery list or riding in a taxicab / Are you going to bother putting parsley on the quiche Lorraine now? Dodd Lee asks us. Given what Dodd Lee reveals about the absurdity of the human condition, we’re free to answer this question either way or not at all.
The Bay is one of the finest poetry collections to come out of the Midwest in a long time, and David Dodd Lee is a real force.
