Review - In the Lights of a Midnight Plow by David Hickey

In the Lights of a Midnight Plow
by David Hickey
Biblioasis, 2006

Reviewed by Joanna M. Weston

David Hickey’s lyricism shines in this, his first collection of poetry. He has a gift for finding the appropriate but gently surprising image and using it with precision while retaining rhythm. The majority of the poems reveal nostalgia at leaving childhood, ‘part of your past/ that’s catching/ up with you’ (p.13), its innocence and irresponsibility, behind. The last two sections speak with the voice of an increase in maturity.

The first section, ‘The disappeared forest’, focuses on the memories of Hickey’s childhood growing up in Prince Edward Island, of a lost baseball, picking strawberries, or a garage fire. They are the memorabilia of anyone looking back and savouring the precious moments of youth.

He wants you to believe his barns are
the starlit descendants of Bethlehem,
not the last trees of a disappeared forest,
all gossamer and ghost bark, smelling
of horse hair and bull seed, … (Barns, p.17)

Barns disappear from the landscape to become a pile of boards that hold dreams, possibilities, and memories of lost Christmasses.

Images roll through Hickey’s poetry, ‘a wind-stiffened gull’ (p.19), ‘the shore-lines rocky bruises’ (p.21) accumulating impact and wonder until the different facets of the poem shine more brightly as the poem is read and re-read.

The Hanging Tree
Gave the field a centre to rush towards
a centripetal scarecrow
hung with swings and sparrows that circled
as though decorating fairground air …. p.15

The enjambed title hangs and leads into the poem. The tree is revealed as being in the middle of the field, bare-branched, and yet a focus for birds which circle and dance around it. All this being said with economy and flowing language.

Language gets richer, ideas deeper, towards the end of the book as Hickey writes of an old man at his wife’s grave (p.52) or a physiologist hunched over a quadricep

as if it were an immaculate switchboard. Until now,
the man in the chair has been unaware of
the charge his body carries …
…When the pulse passes through
his muscle, measuring its composition, he forgets
the conduciveness of fibres, and imagines …
… The song the body so
often sings, the progressive scales of its working.
In the Human performance Lab p.53

He connects the scientist to the human body and to music, the connection complete and vital, both physical and emotional components of humanity being touched and realized.

In ‘River Liberties’, seven linked sonnets, Hickey explores the relationship between stars, anger, gravity, thought, and finally to stars reflected in a river. From the first line, ‘The more furious the star, the more brightly it burns.’ to the last couplet ‘the night’s eyeless socket,/ pursuing a distant concern’ (p.67-73) there is consistent development of Hickey’s view of the created world and his place as observer and recorder.

The last poem, ‘The Glass Desert’, speaks with a social conscience, of the first atomic bomb detonated in New Mexico and its after-effects. An understated anger pulses through the poem. The words are hard, nostalgia gone, only a desire to change the result remains: ‘I hope to have imagined a lifetime spent staining its glass.’ (p.76)

There is real hope that Hickey will continue to observe and record the world around him with effortless use of language, deepening insight and rich poetry.