While my mother reads I watch her hands,
Rough, arthritic now, turning the pages
And think I've watched them change for fifty years.
Wiseman is on record as being a poet who follows the dictum laid out in the verse of a poet who has been a tremendous influence on his career. Philip Larkin urges poets to use the unique powers offered by verse to preserve what they have seen, thought and felt. Thus, the bulk—perhaps even the entirety—of Wiseman’s body of work describe the tangible. His is not the poetry of the teleological search; he asks readers to consider the what, where and when of the substantial rather than the why of the abstract. This literary philosophy is laid out here in the opening lines of these poem which is immediately accessible to, arguably, just about everyone.
The fellow in the tights
Worries me most. Suspicious,
My eye goes to his crotch.
There’s enough there certainly
But tied down so tightly
You’d think he was trying to hide
Some gross impediment.
This mission to preserve what has been seen, thought and felt makes Wiseman a master of not just detail—which is pursued inexorably through the description of his mother’s rings in the above excerpt—but a master of observing through specific perspective. This poem of a ballet performance as seen through a Philistine—in this instance meaning merely no fan of the form—goes on to be equally concerned about the ballerina and the possibility that the intertwined dancers could ever possibly have actual sex together. The it draws to an end with a description of the speaker: tall, heavy, awkward and with a pregnant wife with whom he shares a messy apartment. It does not sound autobiographical, but it feels it.
Oh son, at twenty-four
You don't know how important farewells are,
Or how they bring back things too hard to bear,Grim things from which we know we can't recover.
Fly safely. I'll write, I promise.
These lines which are found in the middle of this short poem both looks and feels autobiographical. In fact, it comes across as intensely personal because it eschews irony or comic effect for sincerity, but is also about a singular moment in time lacking any apparently world-changing significance. Significance is there, of course, simply by virtue of the poet needing to compose his verse in order to preserve the moment, but that moment is one of quiet and most private meaning.
We’re in a movie set. Unsettling, this
As it’s familiar ever since I saw
Stagecoach as a kid, and then John Ford’s other
Takes, loving and obsessive, of the place.
The “movie set” is not a film studio or even an actual set for filming, but rather the natural grandeur along the Arizona/Utah border where director John Ford actually did make many of westerns like Stagecoach. The poet can still be seen pursuing the idea of preservation, but in this case (as well as the other poems in which Wiseman offers commentary upon pop culture icons) there is a two-fold aspect to the observation. The recording of what he sees and feels as he is overwhelmed by the magnificence of the landscape is filtered through the idea of having already been there y virtue of having already seen it so many times in the films of Ford. So the experience has a strange shadowy substance to it; the reality of being there and the memories of seeming to have been there.
