The Invisible World Made Visible: Matt Daly’s Conversation with Cotton Mather and the Principles of Seeing
Douglas Cole
What a pleasure it is to be again in the world of Matt Daley's poetry and to see the connections between this book and his previous book, Between Here and Home. And yet there is a unique endeavor in The Invisible World, as Daly makes a fascinating journey into conversation with both an historical and a family figure, Cotton Mather. Like Daly's previous book, The Invisible World explores our relationship to the land: how we view it, how we misunderstand it at a cost, and how we are in a process of evolving and reclaiming ways of seeing so that the “invisible world” is no longer the dangerous mystery it was to Mather, that personal historical ancestor who seems to still haunt us.
The Invisible World places itself in conversation with both the wonders of the invisible world as “The Wild” (or a kind of spiritual energy) and the world as seen by Mather, and it becomes a reclaiming, a re-visioning, a way of seeing the world and our relationship to it that we need reminding of. Daley's book, then, is a reaching for clarity, a refining of vision to include those energetic threads that lie under the surface, perhaps unexamined, and to see those threads clearly for how they affect our understanding of this world and our place in it.
Daly sets this up as a daily practice: reading and responding almost in the form of prayer, entering with negative capability to more deeply see the world in dialogue with this ancestral voice. What Daly has created is not simply a condemnation of false ways of seeing lodged in the past but an invigorating gravitation towards a “sense of good and right” in seeing “wild places.” He is contributing not only to “healing” broken ways of seeing but to refining how to see the past and how to better see and be in relation to “The Wild.”
One of the ways that Daly accomplishes this shows up in the titles of the poems, all denizens of wild places — “Gray Wolf,” “Moose,” “Golden Eagle,” “Bat,” “Honeybee” — as though in contrast, or in refinement through this conversation with Mather, Daly turns to look more directly and with much more sophistication and nuance than this ancestor at the communities we live in in our wild places.
Take for example “Spotted Frog,” in which it seems the poet is dissecting a frog; hence, it's “pinned” and “split,” and yet from this seemingly modern, scientific observation of the frog (perhaps in some ways more akin to Mather’s view of The Wild, yet removing the stigma of “evil” while retaining in the scientific “objectivity,” a view of difference or other), the poet continues past this oppositional if not antagonized view of The Wild to join poet and frog. At first, the point of view of the poet: “What I remember is looking up into a blue sky…” Then the point of view of the frog: “…gazed up past my eyes into a space we could not fathom…”
In this juxtaposition, the poet and The Wild (in the form of frog) unify in their confrontation with the bigger expression of The Wild, “the Milky Way.”
Another beautiful example of this evolution of vision appears in “Bison Calf,” in which the poet, mending fences, stands back to assess how the West has been impacted by human contact and the remains of “unnecessary wire,” which, like laws, economies, even sciences and other objectifying byproducts rooted in that Matheran view of The Wild, have shut out our relational and even spiritual connection. The poet realizes that in the act of building the fence, some repetition of these flawed relations is reenacted: the “drumming” of the head repeated twice as if to underline the amount of influence (subtle maybe, but dense) we have to get through to see at last the landscape “unmade,” to find and see the land as “what it always was.” Again, this is not the “evil” of Mather’s view, nor the lifeless object of the scientific view, but what is left: “wild in its appearance and wild still in what does not appear.” When the poet concludes “I compose myself leaning on a top-rotten post,” we see a mind creating its own relation and vision out of a “top-rotten,” or inherited, perspective. Once again, the mystery, the beauty, the spirit of The Wild has room to manifest in the creation of the poem as well.
This more evolved perception on The Wild shows again and again. For example, “Red Wing Blackbird” opens with the statement “the kindness of blackbirds returns,” as if to speak even more directly to that puritan model and perspective on The Wild as evil, inert and other. This reclaiming of spirit might even be an echo of another reclaiming that seems to address the Matheran way of seeing The Wild, namely the Transcendental view of nature expressed by Emerson: “All natural objects make a kindred impression when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection” (“Nature”). Much like Emerson, Daly’s book continues a transcendental investigation of our inherited views, the limited even erroneous way of seeing The Wild (coming from communities like Mather’s) that Transcendentalists were also trying to dethrone.
A last note on form. Daly has two longer pieces built in the Anglo Saxon two-column form. This seems an appropriate form for the kind of “conversation” Daly’s book engages in, in its direct conversation with the ancestor, like “The Wonder is Land,” wherein the poet states, “The spirits I see / around me and feel inside my lungs, are, I think, the same spirits you / were eager to docket for a trial.” The theme here is consistent, but the form and its use of spaces emphasizes the notion of an older, ongoing conversation and implies an answer that is not only forward-looking but reclaiming of forgotten ways of seeing implied by the older form. And again, in the final poem, “Plant Apparitions,” Daly employs the split line, the form playing a role in how to move past yet reclaim ways of seeing:
I would come to know sandstone, tamarisk
Throat-handing desert streams, and a woman
Daly’s book directly confronts this ancestor’s way of seeing, someone who lost sight of how
To be made again of sunlight
And the reachings of radicles is the oldest
Memory I’ve written into each place
And thus Daly’s book reclaims a purer if older, unadulterated version of seeing. “I sense now, with that sense / underneath my senses.”
