Not for nostalgia
Robert Stewart Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, by Joseph Stanton, Shanti Arts Publishing, 2023. A poem in Lifelines, by Joseph Stanton, itself called “The Life Line, 1884,” based on a painting of that title by Winslow Homer, depicts a man and woman hanging from a breeches buoy, being hauled across storm-heavy seas onto a rescue ship outside the frame, likely off the coast of Massachusetts. Although the poet creates a ghostly scene—personal and even slightly sexual, as if the two were alone, hanging out in the panoramic storm—I am pushed, simultaneously, to another panorama, of August 2023, where the U.S. Navy moved aircraft carriers into San Diego Bay at my old base, NAS Coronado, in preparation for hurricane Hilary, the first tropical storm in the region in 80 years. The breeches buoy was fresh news in 1884, but the waves now are bigger and more expansive with the great warming of the planet, tempering my approach even to a poem’s hopeful lifeline. The first 100 pages of Lifelines devotes itself to poems about Homer’s art, Stanton being a professor emeritus of art history, among other trades; the second part of the book devotes itself to poems about Edward Hopper. Nothing about my reading or the art discussed in this book is nostalgic. I should be discussing Stanton’s craft, his alliteration and irony, the internal dynamics of poetry, and how, for example, Stanton’s poem about Hopper’s “Nighthawks, 1942” delightfully puts Hopper, himself, and wife,