A Review of Spirit Spout by Devon Balwit

Review by Steven Knepper

Devon Balwit, Spirit Spout. Nixes Mate Books, 2023.

Review by Steven Knepper

Devon Balwit’s Spirit Spout plumbs the depths of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick.  Most of the collection’s poems begin with a brief epigraph (or, to use Melville’s preferred term, “extract”) from the novel.  Some of the poems are in the voice of Ishmael or Ahab or Starbuck. Many reflect on or dramatize scenes from Moby-Dick. 

But Balwit also allows this great novel of metaphysical speculation and existential concern to plumb the depths of her own life, so that some of the poems are Melville-inspired reflections and riffs on contemporary settings and experiences.  While reading Spirit Spout, I at times found myself thinking about Robert Lowell’s great Melville-inspired poem “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” which is an elegy for his cousin who died at sea while serving as a Navy lieutenant during World War II. Stylistically, Lowell’s poem and Balwit’s poems are quite different, and Balwit certainly has her own distinctive voice, but both twine together Moby-Dick and the personal in sophisticated ways. 

The sonnet “Sailor’s Log” provides a good window into the collection and its concerns:

          Melville saw a man plunge into the sea
	  and threw him tackle, which he dropped, smiling as he sank,
	  the jump intentional, his chosen way to free
	  himself from suffering. As the ship’s sails shrank
	  on the horizon, he let himself go down
	  as a means of rising. Others plummeted from a moment’s
	  inattention, wailing as they left the shrouds, a sound
	  that needled every heart, and deeper, as impatient
	  captains halted the search, no body to be found.
	  Storms toppled ships or set survivors 
	  hopelessly adrift. What finally washed aground
	  was but a fragment of keel, cask, or collar.
	  So many ways, then, that we cease to be,
	  and so few who stop and note our journey.

Line eight’s “and deeper” is near the heart of this poem, both literally on the page and thematically.  Deeper than what? Deeper into what?  The “deeper” most readily applies to the “heart” of the sailors who are troubled by witnessing the death of their shipmates tumbling into the sea.  They are “needled” at a level even “deeper” than the heart—in the very foundations of their being? In their soul? 

But the “and deeper” is situated in such a way that its referent is somewhat ambiguous, so that it includes but also reaches beyond the unsettled sailors.  Appropriate enough, since this is a poem of at least four-fold depths: the literal depths of the sea, the depths of the human (not only the sailors who witness the death, but also the interior depths of those drowning, mysteriously suggested in different ways by the smile of the sailor who intentionally drowns at sea and by the wail of those who drown inadvertently), the abyss of death, and the unplumbable mysteries of existence. Each of these depths receives its due in the poem and throughout the collection, but they also each figure the others in various ways.  To play upon the rhyme of the poem’s closing couplet, “to be” is to be on a precarious “journey” amidst such depths.  Neither Melville nor Balwit offer definitive certainties regarding these depths, but they do offer a kind of counsel.  Contra the “inattention” that devours so much of our lives (and can literally devour our life if we are inattentive at the wrong time), we can “note” the journey. We can attend to our own lives and those of others. We can attend to existence itself.  This is a way of honoring and memorializing the frail and finite, but it is also a way of trying to discern some hints of the deeper truth out of the “fragments” that we can grasp.

Stylistically, Balwit’s poems are often written in a musical free verse that hovers close to a more regular meter, with rhyme and near-rhyme surfacing occasionally.  Many of the poems are written in couplets.  Most are relatively brief lyrics.  Even the longer poems are made up of short sections.  

Balwit is deft at deploying intentional ambiguities.  (Melville, of course, was pretty darn good at this himself.)  In the poem “Queequeg’s Ramadan” (see Moby-Dick, Chapter 17) for instance, the identity of the speaker blurs between Ishmael and the poet’s persona: “I both envy and belittle your devotion. / My own comes and goes like weather.” 

Balwit is also a master of tension and paradox.   In “This Woman Votes to Keep Melville in the Canon,” Balwit notes the conspicuously small number of women characters—and the thinness of their roles—in Moby-Dick.  Yet Balwit still finds much to identify with in the novel and its characters: “Like Starbuck, / I fret over plots I lack strength to bring to fruition  // and feel nostalgia for a self I’ll never revisit.  Like Tashtego, / I cry out at midnight for rum.” But after this poem about the capacious human power for identification, Balwit immediately offers one about its limits (and the ways even a great and generally humane author like Melville can fall into stereotypes).  “Heel” begins “White, I can’t know how Pip’s description reads / to one who is Black…”

These poems have something to offer the reader who does not know Melville’s novel well, but familiarity with Moby-Dick adds much to the reading of them.  In his back cover endorsement, Paul Merchant calls Spirit Spout a “rich commentary on Moby Dick [that] brings to life fifty of the innumerable poems hidden in Melville’s prose.”  This is a fitting and insightful description, though I would add that, due to its personal meditations, the collection is also more than a commentary in the strict sense.  

Avid Melville readers will be intrigued by how Balwit riffs on scenes both major and minor.  In “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby-Dick, for instance, the somewhat dreamy Ishmael goes up into the masts to watch for whales and almost tumbles to his death mid-reverie:

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

Here is some of Balwit’s commentary in a subsection with the same title (“The Mast-Head”):  

          Now, I pendulum beneath sky like
	  the stylus of an automaton, scribing

	  the air with daydreams. I am both
	  smaller than ever I was and vaster,

	  a pepper-speck in God’s broth-bowl,
	  and the inhale of universal lungs.

Poetic lines do not get much more Melvillian than “a pepper-speck in God’s broth-bowl.” To me, “The Mast-Head” is a particularly interesting chapter of Moby-Dick for Balwit to reflect upon because, while there is a place for such reveries in her collection, they also risk an inadvertent tumble into treacherous waters (as she notes in “Sailor’s Log”).  Rather than a poetry of revery she more often writes a poetry of responsive attention, like a sailor balancing in a whale boat.

Overall, this is an impressive collection, an accomplishment of poetic dexterity, psychological insight, and erudition.  At times, I wish Balwit would have given a bit freer reign to the sonic effects that so often animate her poetry, both in this collection and beyond.  I also would have liked to see a longer poem—a mini-epic to match the scope of Melville’s novel or Lowell’s “Quaker Graveyard”—alongside the short lyrics. But those are quibbles about a volume I will return to again and again.  (I will also share some of its poems with my students since I occasionally teach a seminar on Moby-Dick.)

It’s also important to note that this book is a beautiful physical object.  Congratulations are due to Nixes Mate Books for the excellent design work.  Spirit Spout’s larger format and the intricate, high-resolution scrimshaw image on its cover make it the rare poetry collection that could double as a coffee table book.  Visitors might pick it up off that coffee table for its striking design.  They would keep reading because of the insight and energy of Balwit’s poetry. 

Steven Knepper is the editor of New Verse Review.

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If you’d like to read sample poems from Balwit’s collection, here are links to a few in their original publication venues:

“Castaway” in The Christian Century

“Selfie” in Anti-Heroin Chic

“Fast at Both Ends” in What Rough Beast/Indolent Books