Edmunds Treads Tired Road to Taos

The High Road to Taos

by Martin Edmunds

From the National Poetry Series

University of Illinois Press, 1994

Martin Edmund's poems in The High Road to Taos invite comparison to the celebrated prehistoric paintings of the Lascaux caves in France. Both include images on a huge scale, natural subjects, an undercurrent of strange spirituality, But they also leave the viewer with the sensation that the scenes and emotions they illustrate have long been dry. The reader is forced to wonder, "Has the passion, like the paint, faded with time, or is the artist receiving too much credit?"

The High Road to Taos, Edmunds's first collection, was chosen by poet Donald Hall as a 1993 National Poetry Series winner. His poems have previously appeared in The New Yorker, Southwest Review and anthologies of young poets.

Edmunds repeatedly confronts his readers with the same images, until they seem to be pictograms rather than unique visions. By the end of the volume, Edmunds has only succeeded in teaching his symbols for regret and desolation. The reader fears this may be all that Edmunds has to teach.

The work collected in The High Road to Taos, like the book's cover, has been treated with a wash of red tones. Invariably, it is the red of poetic melodrama: rust, dead roses, dried blood and red earth. These shades have long been standard images for poetic reflection, leaving to Edmunds only stains on memory.

When using a voice of chronological distance Edmunds' words are impotent. In a short poem, appropriately titled, "Weathering," the persona speaks with regret to his lover, "Remember last August, my desire/dying down like roses from toothed leaf to bud." Yet later in the poem, the speaker insists to his lover, "I want you." At this point the reader may be tempted to respond, "I don't think so." But perhaps a fistfull of red-dirt and a few dead roses would more adequately convey her regrets in the poet's own language.

Edmunds employs a variety of more erotic images in contrast to the high road of his title. As the name of the collection suggests, the poems in The High Road to Taos come from a writer on a journey of the spirit. The combination of eroticism and spirituality has inspired artists of all mediums, from the earliest stone carvings depicting voluptuous earth goddesses to the recorded pinings of Madonna. However, Edmunds's poems very rarely succeed at effectively merging his erotic and spiritual longings.

His personae worship women, sending out hosts of souls, spirits, and metaphorically disembodied hearts on pilgrimages to find their goddesses. The effort is futile, as the speaker in "I Have Tried to Find You" recognizes. (Please see poem below).

His heart is sent back after one such mission stained with red clay and cracked from the harsh sun. In Edmunds' voice of lament, he wishes he were green. He desires a different more alive form, to be "green rain on grass. "It may not be easy to being green, but it's better than being red in Edmunds's desert.

Edmunds's passion, painted in memory and reflection, soon dries to an uninteresting shade of melancholy. His inability to seem wholly present in his own memories weakens the collection. To move a reader, the poet must seem able to move himself, if only to show signs of life.

Although he falls short when invoking high passions, Edmunds invoking high passions, Edmunds proves a competent tour guide through more earthly terrain. His travels lead readers through the desert communities of New Mexico, and allow them to wander briefly into Egypt and Russia.

Edmunds's time travel is more successful when he ventures into the present tense of childhood, speaking actively instead of reminiscing. When he takes full possession of a subject, to the extreme of metamorphosis, the poems find their strongest voice. This strategy also lets Edmunds play with the vocabulary and mythology of several cultures.

Translating directly from Spanish, he paints the mighty tropical storm, El Nino, into a small boy, hudding, "like us,/ gnawing his knees."

Perhaps most engaging are Edmunds' interactions with nature--in the form of personified plants. These pieces are short enough that they can sustain themselves to the end, without the scarlet-hued melodrama of death or memory fading them. They are appropriately infused with sunlight by more lively color images. One of Edmunds' most vital poems, "Willows Coming Into Leaf," has haiku-like impact.

to have seen, to have held you

naked under your dress

in your green silk slippers, Spring!

Edmunds often moves to formal verse in his longer pieces in The High Road to Taos, , resorting to trite rhyme schemes like, "Farewell, my love, goodbye/Red wine, and oyster pie..." The feeling of spontaneity in exploring a single image, taking a break from the main road is lost. While several small moments of impact may be contained within a single poem, they cannot save the whole from fragmentation.

Edmunds plays it too safe, letting his emotions dry as if they were Lascaux's cave paintings, sensitive to light and life. He forgets that his work is contemporary, the worth of its preservation has yet to be proven. Hidden in distant caves it loses, its chance for glory in the sun.

I Have Tried to Find You for for Lavinia Currier

I have tried and I have tried to find you.

I have sent my mind out towards you:

blank walls! bare rooms!

Everything empty and white, except

on a white pine table, in a drinking glass,

the white flame of a candle mantles its wings and burns.

I have sent my spirit out n search of you--

cold winds moaning alone over mountain peaks;

purple evening deepening to the note

of a blown conch, steeped in the sea

and blue as the o in soul.

I have sent my heart out to look for you

and it comes back daubed wet with red clay

from a riverbed, beginning to dry

and crack in the sun.

Now I send my love out on four winds,

and ask it to come towards you down the path

you are traveling, to be the first green thing your eye

lights on one morning, to find you and stay with you

and not come back to me

I wish I were green rain in a grass field,

or green-gray rain

in an orchard of olives, or warm rain with a soft

green-gold wind in it, or white rain

falling softly through blossoms of apples

or the wind, or wind-blown sunlight itself,

so I could hold you in my arms which are not my arms,

so you could rest in me

the way the Branford pear, under its burden of petals,

clusters of still-wet stars,

leaned its new weight on the daylight in the park

an hour ago,

so my heels could spark a circle of white flames

about your feet,

so you could feel how the light loves you

as it wants to do. From The High Road to Taos