The Pearl Diver’s Daughter (Cloud Mountain Press 2023) by Michael David Blanchard is a collection of gently intellectual and lyrical poems which often question the place in the world for both poetry and for a poet. Filled with evocative sensory details, radiant natural images, and a frequent sense of curiosity and wonder, the poems are a delight—and sometimes a mystery.
Using the pearl of the title poem as a metaphor for poetry itself, Blanchard creates multi-layered, nuanced pieces that cross delicately between assessable and allusive, inviting his readers –like the pearl diver—to push “beneath the surface where two lives diverge.” Within his poetry, sometimes a gemstone is a diamond, and then, again, sometimes it is a universe of “myriad points / of distant lights.”
The curiosity and sense of wonder awakened in the opening poem, “An Atlas of the Night Sky,” carries through several other poems as well but particularly shines in “Atlas.” The narrator in that poem lies shirtless on his back at night to see “unfold / in the summer sky / the map charted once / by mariners and mystics.” After contemplating such mythology as Hercules and Minos’ daughter playing out in constellations and the ancient arts of celestial navigation, the poet ponders what “mind could have read” and more:
what shirtless wanderer contrive
from so many balls of burning gas
a way to light our way
over dark seas
and through a darkened world?
Curiosity and wonder also radiate in “Caddo,” in which a canoe “primeval as the alligators” is found “a millennium later / dislodged by spring floods” only to be discovered by us, “waiting and searching, / the past indefatigable in its desire / to be redeemed from time’s escrow.” In this poem, even those with partial knowledge are left with a curiosity for the whole. “What those who know can only guess / is how the cypress / became part of the / alluvium of time’s current.”
In yet another intelligent poem questioning the way of things, Blanchard observes in “Navigating the Navidad,” that “There is something in the way / a river flows that makes us / want to know its beginnings.” The poem is carefully and artfully structured and repeats that line with minor variations including its “windings,” so that near the poem’s conclusion, the river makes one “want to know its endings.” While the Navidad River in Texas works literally as a strong visual image, that river also evokes a sense of something deeper, no doubt spiritual, in seeking the beginning, the winding, and the ending.
Consistent with the curiosity and sense of wonder conjured throughout many of these poems, several grasp for an understanding of poetry itself. Within these verses, Blachard often moves with light steps between the accessible and the allusive. In the title poem, the narrator speaks of pearl divers “disappearing into the murk” where they will “come to their own terms / with what matters most.” And in the “Lady of the Golden Pagoda,” the lady waits for her lover as one might wait for the poem to develop. She places her head on a silken pillow beside “a tear of a pearl,” though still her lover will not come. Thus, a poem is both a lover and a pearl, and requires “a thousand penances” for its dalliances.
Perhaps the most daring, and certainly longer and more complicated, piece about poetry is “And the Mountain Replied.” In this poem, the narrator is a mystic and poet deep in contemplation, but also a practical person who knows to plant his garden seeds in spring and to eat and relish the pears and persimmons of fall:
the poet sat in the shade of the persimmon tree
and hoped for enlightenment
soon the persimmon shed its leaves
so the poet sat and ate his fill
of ripe persimmons
All of Blanchard’s fine poems in this collection are lushly imagined and filled with sensory images. “And the Mountain Replied” is a particularly fine example of his talent for putting the reader into the sights and sounds of the poem’s world by eliciting the many senses. In “Mountain Replied,” one can see the “cloudy night” with its “gauzy glow” and see the deer at the river, just as one can feel the “warmth on the crown / of the poet’s bare head.” Readers might well taste their “fill / of ripe persimmons” and the “sweet soft flesh” of a pear, as well as hear the thunder, the coming storm, and the howling at the moon. Like the poet/narrator in “Mountain Replies,” one can smell the coming storm, the “sweet smell / of lilacs in the rain,” and count the “breaths between / thunder and lightning.”
Just as “The Mountain Replied” blends the natural with the spiritual and the practical with the creative process, these splendid poems in The Pearl Diver’s Daughter carry the reader through a sensory-laden world of wonder and beauty. All in all, a very fine collection of tender, thoughtful poetry reflecting a poet with an intellectual bent, as well as observant eyes, a profound memory, and ears sensitive to the music in both our world and in words.
Michael Blanchard
Copies of The Pearl Diver’s Daughter can be obtained from the poet via mdblanchard719@gmail.com.
Michael Blanchard is the author of four poetry collections, including The Pearl Diver’s Daughter and Other Poems. A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he now lives in the Cadron Valley of Arkansas, where he teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and edits SLANT, the university’s international journal of contemporary poetry.
The following poem appears in its entirety and with permission of Michael Blanchard.
The Pearl Diver’s Daughter
My father called me by this name
even though it was not the one
he and mother decided for me
The names you live into
he said are better by far
than the ones handed out at birth
And so it was with me
I too became a diver
and lived into holding my breath
and disappearing into the murk
beneath the surface where two lives diverge
one where faces meet other faces
and one where we meet ourselves
in the deep silence of salt sea
just past the point
where earth and water negotiate terms
and divers come to their own terms
with what matters most
pearls of great price
in the commerce of living back
from the warm world of silence
into the world of words and names
It was not the name they decided on
but you can call me Pearl
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