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The Home Atlas

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David Feela's verse contains both the essential qualities of great poems: cutting observations mixed with dulcet timbres. A pleasantness exists in the pages of "The Home Atlas" which resonates with all those who seek beauty in making connections from the ordinary lines of life into the extraordinary mystery of verse. A purchase of this little text will leave the reader feeling all the lovely juxtapositions of brevity and contentment such insights as Feela's provide.

David Feela is a poet who observes and explores, trying to make sense of the world around him, somehow finding the sacred in the everyday. In The Home Atlas, he explores a world that ranges from his own home in Southwest Colorado, the Minnesota of his childhood, to the vast landscapes of history, mythology and the self, but in each locale, the poem is defined by what he sees in the moment.

Robert Frost could be describing Feela's poems when he says "a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Feela's wry humor conveys a sense of wonder in his poems, even though his topics range from the tragic to the absurd, from Catholic-school trauma and Mother Teresa to a glaciated Garden of Eden, and, always, there is an epiphany at the end, as in the poem "Trouble," where a young man juggling school and a job at a rest home comes to this realization:

I had slipped out of my careful body,
become something immense, something
both hideous and dreamy, though I went back to class
looking as if nothing had happened...

I had stepped out of myself and for the first time,
looked back. I could be anything
at all. That was the trouble.

When Feela writes, "I... stepped out of myself and for the first time, looked back," he is not only describing a personal epiphany, but touching on something universal. In effect, this is poetry, something he does over and over in this book, stepping outside himself to examine his boyhood, his marriage, his home town, and myriad other topics. On his marriage, he states dryly "All that is mine is hers/except my side of the bed," and then enters the comic mode of exaggeration by describing his "side of the bed" as "unconquered by armies... unchallenged for centuries." This is Feela's humor, which he never gets away from, and often uses as a vehicle to go beyond.

One way he goes beyond is through metaphor. "Nesting Dolls" are compared to the layers of self that a man contains, and the mysteries of the world are compared to a mother's purse, to name just a few. In a "Row Near Two Grey Hills," he compares weaving to a grandmother combing a sweater and to moss:

She plucks at the warp like a grandmother
picking lint from an old sweater
but the pattern climbs like a beautiful moss
up the north side of her loom so slowly
the children think she does nothing all day long.

This passage, like a good metaphor, grows on itself like moss, accomplishing what good metaphors should--they allow one to see the world in a new way.

The poem "It's 5 a.m." begins the moment a neighbor "starts his truck," but it is the observation about this moment that makes the poem. Feela does this by demonstrating his knack for making the mundane sacred by celebrating the minute happenings in everyday life:

I think of my neighbors truck/as a sunrise, a soft pink
along the hood, changing to yellow
or orange as the engine warms.

Another poem, one that looks at the drab existence of an office job, is "Down Under," where a man has "stopped coming to the office that was his head and went/to live among the aborigines of his heart." This is followed with a striking image: "His colleagues noticed how his body recently/came to rest like an abandoned vehicle behind the desk." He brings the poem to a conclusion that has to do with the heart, where the subject finds a paradise of sorts within himself and he wants to stay there:

He would stay in this primitive place beside the
cascade of his blood, eating his own heart like a
pomegranate, sacrificing his reason on the altar of his
knees.

It is this self that Feela goes back to, but not always as paradise. In "On the Mesa," a man hears a "coyote/calling long distance/from across the field." He wants to engage the coyote in conversation, but doesn't:

I never answer, afraid

we'd talk all night, sharing
some loneliness without
a language to describe it."

And in this, the paradox of poetry is found--to try to find words to express the inexpressible; Feela finds words, words and language that "struggl(e) towards the light" of this human experience.

When, in the title poem, Feela writes, "the map has changed," his answer to this is "depend upon the compass/of your heart," which he does. In The Home Atlas, "Places invent their language." By tapping into this language, Feela has written a book packed with poems that create a new of way seeing the world, and there's just not much else you can ask for from a book of poetry.

David shows us that Life's simple pleasures can not be overstated. With the Stress and anxiety of todays world,Feela's poetry is like sitting in front of a fire with a cat in your lap.

David Feela loves minutiae. Or maybe he just can't help seeing all the small details - the ones most of us shrug off - for what they are, the fabric of our world. His poetry reminds us that what prose would make leaden, poetry elevates.

"Beneath the stone I found a pale universe
the cool, almost brittle shell of the earth
turned on it's back" from The Other Way/The Home Atlas