A Review of Cold Fire by David Mason

Review by Zara Raab

At Home in Praise

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David Mason, Cold Fire. Red Hen Press, 2026.

Review by Zara Raab

Just as ancient Talmudic scholars, adrift in Babylon, found a home in their sacred texts, so David Mason finds his home in words of praise. Even the unspoken words naming the mind’s dizzying shapes upon waking are occasions for joy, “the poems beyond the poems I try to write” (“Caught napping”). Mason is a marvelous appreciator, at home in acclamation wherever he goes, whether it be the Huon River in Vietnam; the gray lake and plane trees of Ioannina; Turkish hillside trees full of prayers; the Bay of Bengal; the mountain light of Colorado; a city seen across the water at night; or the forests of Tasmania, where he now resides. This talent is evident in the new book’s first poem, “Windward,” a brief, subtle, and touching tribute to his father, and in Mason’s tributes to mentors and colleagues. At length and with comparable poignancy, he writes of one of those poetic exemplars in “Yeats”:

I was young when I first loved the sound you made
	And now am old and love it once again

“Shipmates,” dedicated to Dana Gioia, lionizes a friendship dating from their early years on the West Coast, when they shared a taste for formal verse. They are “shipmates” who, out of their “coastal childhoods, far from power,” found themselves “hoisting the same canvas // in the same wind, and plying the same sea.” Mason promises his friend, “From far away, I’ll set a watch for you.” This line works on several levels, including the literal, for Mason in the past decade has traveled far—

			. . . Across the lake
the Space Needle, the office towers, the night.

And then, across more than eight thousand miles,
according to an online map, the town
of Hobart, Tasmania     ("The Distance")

The poet’s impulse to pay homage is both love and a kind of faith that rises even in his contemplation of the broken world. Passing along the streets of a “shattered city, old trees / bent over headstones, monuments overgrown,” he listens and hears the “music of thieves and refugees, / children and saints and all / who rise up from the underground”. Wandering these streets, in a superbly Dantesque gesture, the poet encourages, even admonishes, us:

Listen well. It is the music of
our passage through this world.     ("The Monuments")

At his best, Mason writes from the well of his experiences over a lifetime, even in poems not explicitly biographical. Doing this may be as simple as considering, as you write, whatever “comes to mind,” as Mason does in the strikingly titled, “Things Come to Mind and This is One.” It is a title as unprepossessing as any, yet the extraordinary text can perhaps bear no other title so well. Here, in an apparently remote village, the poet sees a man who has, essentially, no face. The poet does not know how it happened—“some mishap with dynamite”? He does not even know the man’s name and has never heard him speak, has never spoken to him. In the closing lines of the poem, Mason, in revealing his kinship with this cratered face, also says something about the depth of his own lived experience.

Not that his misfortune
was in any way a metaphor,
only that he might have known
what I must learn now,
what I cannot retract or unsay
and all I will never see
and how it is to become
only my ears and eyes
as a seed has eyes,
sending its shoots
into the air.     (emphasis added)

If you have burned “in the rubble of [one’s] own wreckage,” as Mason claims to have done in the poem “My Other Life,” you can make amends, but you cannot unmake it. Mistakes made in life, bad judgments, hurtful actions or words—these cannot be retracted and unsaid. “All I will never see” includes the person he might have become, the one who bears no burn scars, or different ones.

What he has learned that leads to this “Thing That Comes to Mind” includes stepping out of a childhood in a small, rural town somewhere in the West and into a privileged world of poetry publications, podcasts, and travel. Mason knows that his “other” life is always with him, especially in “the things that come to mind”. His other life, without benefit of studies in ancient Greek culture, the life he left, “arrives by sail from the bay under the volcano, / that song at the bend of the road, / that hanging glacier, so cold” (“My Other Life”).

Centuries ago, some people might have said he left his ordained “place” in life, the destiny he was meant for. Did the Enlightenment and America change all this? Surely for many, never all. Mason’s own parents’ struggles are ones he touches on in the book’s first section: His father howls “in the whirl of his own weather”; like the moon, he is “all disorder, / knowing and unknowing” (“Moon on the Huon”). His mother speaks “At the sober end of life. . . / of all the waste, the time she’d lost, the friends”.

She used to think of our capacity
for change. She used to think of human goodness,
but time had taught her not to think so far.
One day was all the distance she need go.     ("Daisy")

Mason and his generation had learned something their parents may not have grasped. He expresses this in an address, not to his parents but to his poet-mentor Yeats.

How are we to live if we only read
ourselves? We have to look beyond one life

to the many lives of all the dead and living.		(“Yeats")

Ambition is thwarted in numberless ways. But to leave your original community, and probably many close ties, like crossing economic or cultural borders, can be a huge step and requires skills not native to all of us. Our freedoms, as denizens of arguably the wealthiest nation on earth, allow Mason to do this. Presciently, Mason approaches the question of freedom through a little-used door—the legal system, by slyly affirming freedom as an inherent value in his poem titled “Obiter Dicta,” the Latin phrase for “said in passing,” and which is not binding in a court of law, unlike obiter decidendi, which is binding.

The poet, then, is not “bound.” “There’s no one to allow me but myself,” he writes.

I’ve gone the distance. Others seem to think
I’ve fallen off the edge where there by monsters.     ("The Distance")

Indeed, he is not “bound.” Was it always so? His “passing thoughts,” the “Things That Come to Mind” as he goes through his days, suggest that though he has “gone the distance,” it has not been without struggle. Is he overconfident now, thinking he has vanquished all monsters, that he will never again “burn in the rubber of his own wreckage”? Mason’s grasp of his human predicament sometimes slips away from him, and he drifts. Occasionally, lines or stanzas of a poem, like the table in Chagall’s painting mentioned in “Obiter Dicta,” will forget gravity. As Mason admits, “I’ve always felt at home afloat.”

On the other hand, Mason is well able to compose poems by obiter decidendi, following the strict old rules of rhyming words, the strict adherence to set form. One particular favorite of mine comes about, I think, as a result of Mason’s love for the world, and the kind of faith that comes with that love. “Ballade with a Refrain by Shirley Hazzard” is four stanzas, each more marvelous than the one before it, rhyming throughout a b a bb c b c. It begins

The near-at-hand was rain refined from air.
The far-away was war and cities falling,
a building disemboweled, a broken chair,
one engine starting and another stalling.
An old man climbed the rubble, calling, calling.
Two missiles answered, nothing like a song.
A mother tried to stop her baby’s bawling.
The earth insisted there was nothing wrong.

Although this ballade is not biographical, I dare say that it could not have been written without the understanding and direct experience of a range of human suffering. To my mind it comes from Mason’s lived experience over many years, and works without needing a personal dimension.

The title poem “Cold Fire” isn’t biographical, either, of course, entrapped as it is by anthropological details. Looking up the phrase ‘cold fire’, I find the term refers to “a cultural burning practice whereby Aboriginal Australians regularly use fire to burn vegetation.” This ancient fire management technique, which gives Mason his title poem, is apparently still practiced in the 21st century by the Noongar people. The poem’s form is interesting. To begin, three sonnets present on the page in separate sections as loosely rhyming tercets, each closing with a couplet whose end words repeat. The sonnets are followed by a fourth section consisting of two tercets and a couplet that does end rhyme—“signs” with “sings.” The poem recounts what happens when a cold fire is initiated in the Australian outback, beginning with a third person description and switching to first person:

These are the makings of my native hymns,
my breath clouds nakedly in air like smoke,
cold fire inside me, outside me. . . 

On its literal level, the concern of the poem is with ancient and ongoing cultural practices on the other side of the globe—Tasmania. The poem appears in the book’s third section. Sandwiched between this and the book’s first, pre-Tasmania section is a group of poems and translations “from another time,” primarily from the years Mason studied in Greece and traveled abroad. Some of these are told as stories from ancient or long-ago times, the story of a widow who guards the poet’s patch of land—not only guards but covets, so that each day she moves the stones marking the boundaries of the two lands. Another relates what happens to Skatouli, a Greek word meaning Little Shit, the name of a “cat so small, / so battered and grimed from one scrawny end / to the other, she was hardly there at all.” Other poems in this section are memories of the poet’s time in Greece. “The Plane Tree” recalls “the spreading plane tree roofing / a tavern where I dined with friends now dead, / the village plant trees where the old ones gathered” (54)—a lovely poem in that it calls to mind a treasured poem by Charlotte Mew written in the first quarter of the 20th century, when the plane trees in London parks were all cut down. The section draws to a close, but not before featuring translations, or perhaps “imitations” would be a better word, of drama by the ancient Greek Aeschylus, and several modern Greek poets, including Yannis Ritsos, C.P. Cavafy, George Seferis, as well as a poem addressed to the Greek poet Sappho.

Cold Fire often draws skillfully on imagery from the various places Mason knows through his travels, and in the best poems, he writes from a deep comprehension of both our 21^st century world and the narrow one of childhood, as well as the distance between. Worth noticing here, too, is the strength and humor Mason can unleash when he decides to be brief. “A Declaration” is a love poem, and I applaud that. But I wish that he did not bury lines like these, below, in a page of free verse:

Not that I haven’t felt the terrible if.
Not that I haven’t thought

of walking into the woods and not
returning. The pistol shot. The cliff.

His “Cuttings” are marvelous, many, many small bon mots like

Two men and a woman
In a room. Who
Do you think is doing
The listening?

But go buy the book. There’s plenty more where that one came from, and as I have tried to show, much else to love.

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Zara Raab is a Powow River Poet living north of Boston. Her book is Swimming the Eel, reissued in 2020 in a revised and expanded edition. She occasionally writes reviews of poetry books for New Verse Review and Religion and the Arts.