By Theodore Haddin
Madville Publishing; January 16, 2024
Paperback: $18.95; eBook: $8.49
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by Edward Journey
For the young boy in “First Moves,” the first poem in The Pendulum Moves Off: poems, a new collection by Theodore Haddin, “It’s always a time / coming; he doesn’t yet think of / how it will be passing.” The progression of time in these poems sneaks up on the reader. Time – both human-made and natural – is an essential component of poems which can be both mournful and hopeful and ever-conscious of the fragility of our home on this planet. “So the garden goes down,” Haddin writes in the title poem, “as if Adam / has had his look in, but never gone back.”
Theodore Haddin, a poet, editor, and emeritus professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), is a long-time fixture in the Birmingham arts scene. In addition to a previous book and chapbook, his poetry, reviews, and criticism have appeared in various publications and anthologies. A UAB humanities forum he founded is now named in his honor.
Haddin is a professionally-trained violinist and musical references, along with clocks, are recurring motifs throughout these poems. The poems bear witness, with a tantric awareness, to loss and longing, memory and warmth. The spectre of Thoreau’s Walden Pond appears a couple of times. Rembrandt and Van Gogh are also there. Fish, foxes, trees, raccoons, dandelions, pianos, a poisonous mushroom, autumn, and falling leaves all serve as inspiration. “Winter Wash,” an early poem, is a nostalgic look back at the tyranny of snow and its aftermath. “Brothers” is an abruptly shocking poem about sibling rivalry that ends with a spectacular “Coda.”
Haddin’s complex subtlety is illustrated in a poem like “Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time,” written “for Craig Hultgren,” the celebrated cellist. For a reader familiar with the story of Messiaen’s chamber piece, written while he was a prisoner in a German stalag during World War II, the title is evocative enough to influence the reading. It’s not necessary to know the Messiaen, however; the poem is powerful without it. Missing from Haddin’s poem are the birdsongs that Messian famously incorporated into his arrangement. Yet the influence of nature is captured with descriptions of fauna and butterflies and Haddin writes “oh garden of gardens / like our Earth that may be the last one / on the last day …”
The tone shifts throughout The Pendulum Moves Off. At times, there is solace in memory (a grandfather shining a purple 1936 Hudson “as if Sundays / go on forever.”) and at other times there is a plaintive longing for things lost, or being lost through human intervention and carelessness. “Prediction” takes a hopeful look to a time when “the more music / was played, the more war began to fade.” “Taking the Trees” observes that “… trees that remember / with their rings don’t know why humans say / you have to go, the humans themselves don’t know why.”
In the poem “Typing,” Haddin describes “something words could not say / forcing its way on the page.” These poems often seem to be a form of cleansing at times, a catharsis. They invite a pondering of what is good around us, but also what demands change and a deeper awareness. Back in that first poem, “First Moves,” the boy “begins to comprehend how / tock and tick will accompany / him forever.” The clock is always tock and ticking and Haddin gently nudges the reader to lessons we must all heed.
Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).
