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The Home Atlas

review by Robert King

Found in: | Inside | Books |

"The arc is clear and sharp . . ."

David Feela's first full-length book, The Home Atlas , is now out from WordTech Editions, and is ready for an appreciative audience. Feela, who describes himself as a poet, freelance writer, retired high school English instructor, book collector, and thrift store pirate, has had work in literally hundreds of magazines and a prize-winning chapbook, Thought Experiments.

The charm and worth of Feela's poems are presented consistently in The Home Atlas. Look at his first lines which show the poems' accessibility, beginning with our shared experience: "From the top of the power pole," "I watch a farmer lead his horse," "It's 5 a.m./and the neighbor starts his truck," "Last night was cold enough." and "Listen, I was never sent to the principal." As readers we begin with the poet on a small journey through what might be called common life, an experience or observation that grounds us for what is to come.

And what comes is that marvelous transformation only a poem can produce. Look at his last lines, in order with the above first lines: "So much song, so little bird;" "rust can make/a beautiful sunset/at the bottom of an old tin bucket;" "powerless to alter how the universe works;" and "I breathe and behold/each breath." and "I could be anything/at all. That was the trouble."

The arc is clear and sharp, a beginning with the commonplace, what Colorado poet Art Goodtimes calls "the quotidian," and ending on what he calls "the transcendent," a move through shared experience to a touching and poetic conclusion, discovering more than we thought we'd find from our everyday lives. A sunset in the bottom of an old tin bucket.

There are other poems which take us easily to the world of ideas, some giving us the situation in the title, such as "A Marriage Therapist Discusses Adam and Eve," while others set the tone in their first lines: "Once while Petrarch wasn't wooing Laura/he took a sudden interest in the fall of Rome." Others offer speculations about our general situation, such as wondering what life was like "Before Real Estate" or what it's like when "cold is a way of life," or what "Time Is," and these function as smoothly as his more personal observations ("My side of the bed/is mine" or "Before we turn out the lights/I read poetry to her.")

Another pleasure in The Home Atlas is coming upon the poetic treasure of phrases. Feela's crisp, vivid descriptions may even startle us at first, although we quickly realize we have seen this ourselves, and exactly: "Tulips will have opened/and closed like a bright red car door." Or "When the fish strikes, I'll pull it like a root/from the dark" and, in the same poem, "its eyes shocked wide at the light/that lures it from that deep pocket of sleep." Or, in "A Pregnant Woman Dreams", "her fullness like the bubble/in a carpenter's level/seeking its mark." There are many of these eye-opening images in The Home Atlas .

The title poem is no exception to the above remarks. It begins "Not many roads are paved/from where you are" and ends "depend upon the compass/of your heart." Feela's poems are journeys, amazing in their brief span, which start from the life we all live and proceed through clear moments of understanding or questioning to end with a push forward into a deeper life. This is what one asks of poetry and, in Feela's The Home Atlas , it is given to us with a sharp eye and a large heart.

Robert King is the author of Old Man Laughing (2008) and is the director of The Colorado Poets Center (colopoets.unco.edu).