“Everyone in O’Hare is happy today,” begins the title poem of Kristen Lindquist’s engaging new collection. Looking around at the sunlit terminal with its “glorious packaged snack foods” and “racks of Bulls t-shirts,” the poet, too, is in an upbeat mood. Her flight arrived 20 minutes early; on her way to Chicago she saw Niagara Falls and “Middle America green and gold below”; and she joined fellow passengers in thanking the pilot for a smooth landing.
“Any kind of love seems possible,” the poet states, as she watches a couple separate at a gate, the man yelling after the woman, “Hey, I like the way you move!” Yet it’s the questions the poet asks that give this verse its ultimate resonance: “How can I bring this new self back to you, intact?” and the defensive queries that undercut everything at the end: “So what if it’s an airport? /So what if it won’t last?”
Many of Lindquist’s poems take place in less populated spots. In fact, Transportation opens with a lyric invocation of a Maine retreat. “Brimstone Island: One Day” relates a journey to a special spot (“deep within the indigo gullet of Penobscot Bay”) and the rewards gained by fending off mosquitoes and teetering on ledges. In its geological focus, the poem brings to mind Abbie Huston Evans (1881-1983), that poet of Maine and New England who found a like kind of consolation in stone and rock.
Lindquist is an avid birder and travels hither and yon in search of feathered creatures. Monhegan, on the Atlantic flyway, has offered her a wealth of sightings—and inspired a number of poems. “Monhegan Zen” is especially lovely: a series of finely crafted three-line stanzas that evoke the particular “zen” of this island, from its “gnarled spruce and basalt cliffs” to a merlin nabbing a warbler in mid-flight.
As development director at the Coastal Mountains Land Trust in Camden, Lindquist is obliged to spend time outdoors, visiting the preserves (which now number 25) managed by the trust, absorbing the landscape around her so that she can make the case for conservation. For a poet with a passion for nature, it’s a most excellent arrangement. The reader benefits too, by the insights and observations woven into this personal verse.
Transportation is one of those slim volumes of verse one comes to treasure, where nearly every poem (36 in all) does the trick: explores the dark, causes marvel, makes you smile. A short list of highlights includes “What Happened at Work”; “On the Island” (“Nothing can touch you here, not even calories”); “Full Moon”; “At the Carnival” (“I guess he got kicked out of rehab”); “Vinalhaven: Haunting”; and “Safe” (“Safety is relative”). The book’s cover, one of North Haven painter Eric Hopkins’s signature aerial views of the Maine coast, is an extra lure pulling you into the poet’s fulfilling space.
[“Transportation” was read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac on April 4.]
Carl Little is the author of Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems (Deerbrook Editions).