A Review of Losing Streak by Paul Willis

Review by Steven Peterson

Paul Willis, Losing Streak. Kelsay Books, 2024.

Review by Steven Peterson

Losing Streak is Paul J. Willis’s eighth collection of poetry. This one emerged from the Covid pandemic and lockdowns when, according to Willis, he wrote light verse “to cheer himself up.”

We all can use a good cheering up after the pandemic hit us in 2020 and its effects lingered long afterward. Given that collections usually draw together poems that first appeared in journals over the several preceding years, sometimes adding poems appearing for the first time, we are now in what we might call “The Covid Poem Era.” New books of poetry often contain one or two poems set during the pandemic. Some contain an entire section devoted to them. A few poets have even come out with full-length collections entirely made up of Covid poems. All this should be no surprise. Writers write about what they experience.

In this case, it’s a pleasure to step inside a book so full of warm-hearted humor alongside other poems of grief and reflection. Many cast a careful eye on the beauties of nature. Unlike some other poets’ collections, this one doesn’t divide his poems into sections by subject or feeling. It doesn’t escort light verse off to the kiddy table of a separate collection. Instead, there’s a marvelous mix of poems here: a goofy limerick comes right before a portrayal of a lonely old woman gazing out her apartment window; the poet’s consideration of his place as a human in a secluded wilderness precedes a very funny tribute to the pesky mosquito (which nevertheless ends in something surprisingly different from funny).

Some readers may feel Willis raided his notebooks for several of these poems. This reviewer enjoyed the variety. It felt like life: silly one day, saddened the next. Many poems are in that category of occasional poems—for a colleague about to retire, for an infant granddaughter playing delightedly with a hat, for a true love down with the flu on Valentine’s Day. Yet to call them “occasional” slights them. These poems portray the poet settled into a community of relationships, his poems sweet gifts of love and grace. Many make us laugh, one of the sweetest gifts of all, as in his poem “O Callaloo” with its antic lines:

          I cannot climb a billabong,
          I cannot sing the blues;
          I cannot swim the Hellespont
          in orthopedic shoes. 

Some of his best poems combine the commonplace with hints of the eternal, as in “Words to the Wise.” As Willis and his family shelter in place during the Covid pandemic, they pass the time playing Scrabble:

                                                so nightly we
          persist in thinking numbers of the dead
          could not call up our number, leave unsaid
          the randomness of letters we may draw—
          all vowels, all consonants stuck in our craw—
          forgetting the grim reaper soon may spell
          our way to heaven or our way to hell.

Willis retired a few years ago after a long career as a professor of English at Westmont College in California. Perhaps that’s why many of these poems carry the glow of twilight toward the end of a long and active life. There is sorrow in some of these poems, too, notably “In the Aspen Grove.” It moves in three beautifully controlled stanzas from youth to old age to death:

          I saw her face in the aspen grove
          composed where the wind and branches wove
          a halo of dusk-burned clouds in her hair,
              and she was fair.

          I saw the night in her doe-brown eyes
          deepening in the clear moonrise,
          her gaze abstracted and warm and cold,
              and she was old.

          I smelled the sage in the silver sky
          and heard the stream that was rushing by
          to sink in the desert sand like thought,
              and she was not. 

A sure hand with meter and rhyme is on display in these poems. As in the best formal poetry, Willis manages his poetics in ways that add depth and meaning to the poem. In “What Can Be Said,” for example, the first stanza doesn’t contain any exact end-rhymes:

          The bird of paradise is here a flower,
          green-sharpened beak and crest of holy fire
          admixed with Roman spears of violet.
          In Herbert it is likened to a prayer,
          a bird that hovers, never touching ground.

But then a second stanza reverses the order of the end-word sounds and completes the rhymes. The effect, appropriately, is like the open wings of a bird:

          Above the pond they flock the year around,
          not rooted but afloat upon the air
          like hummingbirds, like suns before they set.
          We can join words to them, we can aspire
          To bloom and blaze the speechless flying hour.

If the reader knows the poetry of George Herbert, that 17^th century poet we now group with the metaphysical poets of that time, another layer of meaning is added. “The bird of Paradise” appears in Herbert’s poem “Prayer (I).” That bird is one of many images listed in Herbert’s poem to describe the reciprocal relationship between God and his human creation, rather like the first stanza’s end-words mirrored in reverse order to find their rhymes in the second stanza. A reader familiar with the Christian gospels might also be reminded that, at the baptism of Jesus, the Spirit of God descended like a dove.

His devotion to the natural world—to both its beauty and its fragility—comes through in several other poems. Willis is a good noticer. He has a knack for zooming into the tiny, wondrous detail of a plant, and then in another poem pulling back to take in the panoramic majesty of a mountain, wilderness lake, or sky. This happens in the short poem that give its title to the entire collection, “Losing Streak.” The poem reads in full:

          Contrail crossing the sky,
              contrary to the eye—
          wild blue abraded (why?)
              into a gassy sty.

That poem asks the question. Other poems try to provide the answer, as in the final stanza of “Extempore Effusion at Golden Trout Lake.” The poet is in the John Muir Wilderness Area in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. He watches a half moon rise over a mountain lake and reflects:

          This place will happen fairly in my absence;
          the snows will lap from glacier to the sea.
          I am a part of all I am apart from:
         The half moon rises, partially, for me.

The final poem in the collection is “Steven,” a seven-page narrative in blank verse. We’re with Willis as he recalls the epic hike he and his bride attempted, early in their marriage, from Mexico to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail, through the states of California, Oregon, and Washington.

The poem recounts the innocent enthusiasm of the young couple as they start out on their adventure. Almost right away, reality hits: blisters, exhaustion, unforeseen snow. But then they meet a trailside savior, Steven. He shares his wisdom on how to hike the grueling trail and survive. More than that, he gives the couple his own equipment so they can traverse the snowpacks. Soon the couple is back on the hike, making good time. Steven stays in touch by dispatching postcards to post offices up the trail where he knows the couple will make stops. The postcards encourage them to stay the course: “You’ve got it made! Your feet are singing now…”

As the couple draws near the Canadian border, they look back on their trip and try to comprehend what made Steven treat them with such kindness:

          Sometimes, at evening in a northern meadow,
          the pikas squeaking, marmots whistling clear,
          we’d speak of him, and wonder at his presence
          that lasted long beyond the day we’d met.
          “It’s not that I’m in love,” Amanda’d say—
          “with him, I mean. It’s just that he loved us.
          So unaccountably. That’s just the thing.
          He didn’t have to help us, but he did.”

This is how Paul Willis ends his Losing Streak collection—on a note of gratitude, even at a time of world-wide disarray. Indeed, so many of his poems are grounded in such profound gratitude the book seems more like it’s on a winning streak.

Steven Peterson is the author of Walking Trees and Other Poems (Finishing Line, 2025). His poems appear in Alabama Literary Review, The Christian Century, Dappled Things, First Things, Light, New Verse Review, The Windhover, the ever-popular Elsewhere, and in the anthology Taking Root in the Heart (Paraclete, 2023). His plays have been produced in theaters around the USA. He and his wife divide their year between downtown Chicago and the northwoods of Wisconsin.