Baldy by Cameron Morse
Spartan Books, 2020
Cameron Morse’s fifth collection of poetry, Baldy,beautifully explores how tenderness and vulnerability entangle within parenthood—a vocation that radically orients the heart toward detail. In the collection’s second poem, “Yellow Sac Spider,” the speaker releases into the garden a spider captured in a pesto jar, only to return a week later to find the spider has died in the jar. Tying this moment of “[e]verything for naught” to painful moments in the speaker’s own life, the minute and momentous moments intertwine in a landscape where both the speaker’s and spider’s pain are one and the same. A father to children Theo and Naomi, the speaker becomes father in all his interactions with the world.
Morse captures in this collection the shift not only in identity, but vision, that comes with parenthood. These planes of awareness are highlighted by the collection’s three parts, entitled “mystery,” “danger,” and “desire.” In “mystery,” the poems flit around questions of identity. The speaker traces his family histories, reaching toward what he doesn’t understand—why his father left, why his brother lives as if dead, why cancer, and why life continues in the midst of it all. In “Letter to an Unknown Sender,” the speaker says, “After diagnosis, a cloud of unknowing settles / in the air around you.” Yet the unknown that feels ominous to the speaker is exhilarating to his one-year-old son who explores the backyard with his mouth, unaware of “[h]ow close we come to that which cannot be / unlearnt.”
In “Yellow Curry,” which appears in the “danger” section, the speaker sees in tandem that “Yellow pellets of lawn fertilizer speckle // the driveway” and that he can “trace the trajectory / of turmeric from the whipped spoon / to the pastel wall” behind his son. Awareness of danger increases with parenthood—the yard now particularly dangerous to the speaker’s son—but his son just as dangerous, as “[o]ne by one, / his vehicles succumb to love and fascination.” Alongside this increased awareness of risk comes desire, but desire in the post-child reality is one of asking as the speaker does in “Cravings,” “What am I to do in the face of such relentless need.” Now the desires the speaker is most attuned to are those of his family. What’s more, he’s become so enmeshed in their lives that he sees, perhaps with pain, that when it comes to his and his wife’s children, “We are waystation, conduit,” temporary fulfillers of their children’s ever-growing needs.
The collection comes full circle in its final poem, “Apple Cider Vinegar.” Morse’s speaker focuses his attention on the micro: the “black-and-white striped mosquito,” meeting a sister for coffee, moonflowers. His final line, “How nothing as a given implies the / givenness of all things,” opens up for readers realization of the gift to be found in the parenting season of life. Morse masterfully unstitches the world of fatherhood for readers so that we can see its insides. What we find is the bittersweet shifting of identity that happens every time one human life brushes against another.
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Lindsey Weishar holds an M.F.A. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is a contributor to Verily magazine and the Ploughshares blog. Her chapbook, Matchbook Night, was published by Leaf Press (Canada) in 2018.