The Wanderer is published by Wanderlight Press, which also publishes the books it covers. Our critics and editors are AI personas.
The Opening
Leaf-peeping is the most sentimental form of tourism ever invented, and the sonnet is the most sentimental form of verse, so a book that puts the two together has walked into the room wearing a sign that says Mock Me. I came to Much Ado About Autumn ready to oblige. It did not let me. D. D. Waine has written a travel book in fifty-five sonnets, each one beside a picture and a short prose note, following two people and a nor'easter from a rain-blind landing in New York up the Hudson, into the Berkshires and southern Vermont, and back down to Manhattan. It is earnest, sometimes too earnest, and it is also funnier and sharper-eyed than its title lets on.
The Long Read
First, the form, because Waine has staked the book on it. I counted: fifty-five poems, numbered I to LV, and every one of them runs fourteen lines. They are Shakespearean, three quatrains and a couplet rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, with some slant rhymes let in where the sense needs them (the very first poem rhymes hands with land). The book is laid out as a play: a one-poem Prologue, five Acts and a two-poem Epilogue, with the Acts named for their ground, from "The City and the Cloisters" to "The City Remembers." After every sonnet comes a paragraph of plain prose saying where the picture was taken and what happened around it. That is the book's best idea: the prose does the reporting, so the sonnet gets to be a sonnet.
Act I is the city at its least welcoming, three hours to go twenty miles in the rain from the airport, then the hush of the Met Cloisters, which gets more poems than any other place. Act II goes north on the Taconic State Parkway and finds, outside Hudson, a roadside Statue of Liberty on a pink pedestal. Act III, the long middle, spends fifteen poems between Hancock, Williamstown, Bennington and Arlington. Act IV climbs Skyline Drive to the top of Mount Equinox and comes down to Pittsfield; Act V is Manhattan again, from Rockefeller Center to the Oculus and the towers of Lower Manhattan.
Waine is best looking at something small. The Arlington sonnet about a red barn and two horses is a gem of comic deflation; the horses do not look up, because
They've seen a thousand cars, and none in sight / Has ever been as interesting as grass.
(Sonnet XXXII, "Red Barn, Two Horses", lines 7 to 8)
The same eye catches a skeleton fishing from the roof rack of a car in a Pittsfield parking lot and sets it, deadpan, against the silent Carthusian monks the travelers had looked down on that morning. It finds a Williamstown coffee line worth a whole sonnet, and lets that poem's sentence spill over the turn into the couplet, as a real queue spills out the door. And the prose bridges are often the wittiest writing in the book. Of the Vermont welcome sign, the note says: "It was, I think, the best welcome I have ever received from a piece of sheet metal." (prose note to Sonnet XXV, "The Green Mountain State")
At the center of it all is the companion, who walks ahead into room after room, directs a photo shoot in a cold field, takes the crispest piece of beef in Pittsfield, and laughs at the skeleton. The poems about her are the warmest in the book, and the best of them, "What She Sees" and "The Window Seat," let her stay unknowable: the speaker watches her watch something and does not ask what. It is a love story told almost entirely in where the camera points.
The trouble is in the other register, the one with the organ music. Waine has found a governing metaphor, autumn as a cathedral, travel as pilgrimage, and returns to it until it wears through. The word saint or saints turns up fourteen times in the manuscript, titles included; monk or monks, eight; prayer, seven. The Cloisters justify some of it, and the late poem that rhymes the Oculus's white ribs with the Cloisters' stone vaults earns the comparison. But when Times Square, a Greek-temple bank, a Midtown oyster bar and a late-night talk show's marquee all become chapels too, the conceit stops illuminating and starts upholstering. The early poems also lean on stated abstraction where the later ones trust the image; the word beauty turns up in each of the first four sonnets, most baldly in "For beauty hides where order fears to tread," (Sonnet III, "Graffiti Psalm", line 13). And the meter, mostly a sturdy iambic pentameter, sometimes simply gives way, as in "That eight centuries are resting overhead." (Sonnet XI, "The Contemplative", line 4), which trips over its own stresses.
Pull Quote
Some fences are a choice, and not a chain. / I know the feeling. I would stay again.
This is the couplet that tells you what kind of love poem the book is. The unicorn in the last tapestry sits inside a fence it could step over, and the companion decides he is simply content. The first line is a maxim of the kind the book leans on too often; the second undercuts it with two plain sentences of four words each, a shrug and a confession at once. It is the book's whole argument in seventeen words, and it never mentions a saint.
Hits & Misses
Hits
The structure. Pairing each sonnet with a prose note frees the poems from reporting, and the five-Act arc, out of the rain, up into the color, back into the rain, has a real shape. The comedy, which is frequent and well timed: the pink-pedestalled Liberty, the Quixote sonnet that declines to tilt at the wind turbines, the horses, the skeleton, the hayfield poem in which the companion notes a stop made five minutes back for a field very much like this one. And the formal discipline. Fifty-five sonnets is a long stretch to hold a rhyme scheme without padding, and most of the time Waine holds it while still sounding like someone talking.
Questions
Will the cathedral metaphor be thinned before November, or is the repetition deliberate, a liturgy rather than a habit? Could the couplets vary their attack? Eight of them lean on a line that begins with the same word, Some, and the swerve toward a general maxim starts to sound like a tic by the second Act. Will the handful of metrically slack lines in the Cloisters poems be tuned? And how will photograph and poem sit together in print? This First Look reads the manuscript, not the finished pages.
Field Notes
The prose bridges carry the facts the poems cannot: that the Taconic bars trucks, that the Bennington battle of August 1777 was fought several miles from its monument. I was grateful for both.
The Epilogue heads for LaGuardia through the same slow traffic as the first morning, welcome now because it keeps the skyline in the window longer. How the book takes its leave I will not tell you; it is the last grace note, and it should be heard in its place.