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Review by Off the Shelf Correspondent Denise Provost

Especially in Somerville, many will recognize David Campbell’s extraordinary paintings of local scenes. Campbell’s hyper-realistic scenes of our post-industrial landscape are easy to recognize. His subjects, often painted from rooftops, include defunct factories, dingy streets, wire-crossed horizons, moody skies. Have you looked at Campbell’s painting of Everett Avenue, which hangs in Somerville City Hall – doesn’t it take your breath away?

Campbell’s brilliant paintings have overshadowed his accomplishments as a poet. The poems of Arts and Animals demonstrate the same clear vision and dedication to craft that radiate from Campbell’s canvases. His two chosen arts inform each other in highly satisfying ways.

Arts and Animals: Poems by David Campbell
Goose River Press, 2022 95 pages $14.95

Some of Campbell’s poems observe the act of painting. In The Art Life, we are taken on a journey of growth and disappointment: Ambition came home from the marketplace. Its narrator recollects the doors/I was ushered into and out of. Ultimately, direction shifts:

Ambition is at home
contemplating a plain wall and a window
among trains and loading docks
in a warehouse district
I tend my own house of wares
my light industry.

Expanding on this theme in Ambition is a Crop, the poet describes his work this way:

My job freeze-frames/the planet in its tracks/grinds halts/to time’s continuum/for shing moments/across Somerville and Cambridge.

Other Campbell poems are conventionally ekphrastic – a term taken from the Greek language, referring to poems about other works of art. From them, we can picture a fall of puppet-wire rain, in a print by Hiroshige; almost see how “the two Vermeers muse quietly/in their tiny halls of mirrors….” Yet in these poems, Campbell also reveals much about his own philosophy of art – and of life, the two seemingly inseparable for him. The wry Rembrandt Self-Portrait interrogates the artist to reveal his motive force, receiving as its answer: The visual is everything/or else why paint?

In the marvelous Colmar, Campbell describes the history and details of Grunewald’s spectacular Isenheim altarpiece. Unflinchingly, he links the pests and famines/and flames of God’s Gothic will to the present horrors of our epidemic wars. Then, musing on the depiction of malign beings:

Up they come from Europe’s darkside undertow,
in from a background of arsonist
house-wrecking devils: Fear and Dread
personified, a toppling wave
of jabbing beakheads, blubbery mouths
spiked and blade-feathered hybrid howlers
scrabbling like panicked crabs in a box….

Unexpectedly, some of Campbell’s ekphrastic poems are about music. Some poems tackle the challenging task of describing orchestral music. Others, like The Hills of Roane County, arise from song lyrics.

Long, narrative poems are difficult to pull off, especially in these times. Readers have become used to shorter, more episodic or lyric poetry. Campbell’s Roane County poem is based on an Appalachian ballad about thwarted love, and what becomes of two separated lovers over time. It’s a beautifully wrought work, philosophically wise about the workings of the heart. The jarring Snapshot, 1953 recalls the dissonance of hearing a group of ankle-chained prisoners sing Without a Song while doing road work.

Campbell’s poetry is generally preoccupied with human creativity, morality, and sense of meaning. But he is just as attuned to the dramas of the natural world. Crows, as he describes them, are all revved up like a motorcycle gang/taking over a forest in a drunken ruckus, then/suddenly moving on….” “Monarch” portrays the butterfly as, sovereign of sovereigns, its broader wings/the tickets to Mexico/when it locks eyes with the lowering sun/at the inbred angle. Of Squirrels, Campbell relates how:

Winter came
and wiped out the coordinates
of their buried hordes. We watched
their random, hopeless clawing at the snow….

The image presented by these four lines is not just visual – it is practically an animation. It brings to mind Bruegel’s painting Hunters in Winter, weary figures trudging through the cold, returning almost empty-handed. It’s a reminder that nature, while it has its own laws, is indifferent to individuals.

David Campbell’s paintings – which also give us much to think about – are displayed in the collections of esteemed museum and private collections. His deep, reflective poetry is as close as a favorite bookstore. Campbell’s vision and insight shine from both.