Review by David Butler, Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 76, Spring/Summer 2003.
Thumbing through Theodore Deppe's Cape Clear: New & Selected Poems with, I have to say, increasing engagement and admiration, I am reminded of the late Raymond Carver, with whom Deppe shares an interest in Anton Chekhov ('A Pair of Earrings', 'Letter to Suvorin'). This common interest is not with significance. Carver and Deppe are both largely anecdotal poets, at their most powerful when dealing in the Chekhovian trump cards of precision and restraint. If violence and empathy strangely cohabit their work, they do so with an understated ubiquity that is all the more convincing for the absence of obviously emotive language

Perhaps the most striking poems of the present collection are those which draw upon Deppe's extensive experience as a registered nurse prior to his coming to Ireland in 2000. Again, I am put in mind of those evocative lines penned by another American poet, Robert Lowell, when he urges:

Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.

This grace of accuracy, so pervasive in, say, Carver's 'A New Path to the Waterfall', is readily apparent in Deppe's output. Particularly striking are a group of poems which deal with the troubled child Marisol, 'who'd first / come to our children's unit / when she was five - something broken / behind those eyes, and fierce...' ('Marisol'). In an earlier poem ('The Japanese Deer'), we learn that she was 'raped repeatedly by her mother's boyfriend', and yet was able, on a particular outing, to climb with another troubled child Luis 'for a short time / above the brambled understory, outside history, / discovered a fragrant scent on their hands, / shredded more petals, rubbed the smell deep in their skin.'

But arguably the most effective, and disturbing, of the Marisol poems is the astonishing 'The Book of God'. In place of simple outrage or pathos, this poem, together with 'Admission, Children's Unit', provides us with a glimpse into the complexity of the abused child's perspective. In the latter, a boy who was held down by his mother while her boyfriend inflicted on him 'six wounds, raised, ashy, second / or third degree, arranged in a cross' nevertheless 'anchored himself to her. Glared at me', so that finally 'It took four of us to pry him from his mother's arms.' In the former poem, the child Marisol pins up as a 'bedside shrine' a photo from Newsweek of a crucified Bosnian girl: 'when I took the picture from her wall she dug / her nails in my wrist, tried to bite my hand.' Finally she accepts a notepad upon whose cover she writes 'THE BOOK OF GOD / CAME BACK AS A SMALL GIRL. / On each page she drew pictures she couldn't talk about.' A more manipulative poet might have tried to get more mileage out of the presence of the cross in each anecdote; Deppe is content merely to register the detail, and it remains the more powerful a presence precisely to the extent that it has not been obviously exploited.

For the past few years, Theodore Deppe has been living in the remoter parts of Ireland with his wife Annie, who is a constant presence in the Cape Clear section of the book. Here, too, Deppe is on his guard against the temptation in poetry to mythologize; '"If you see the lark, don't let it become a symbol / in some damn poem of yours. For Christ's sake / let it be itself..."' warns his friend chuck in the poem 'Recitative on Cape Clear Island'. Indeed, the aforementioned 'The Japanese Deer', taken from the 1996 The Wanderer King collection, might be read as a meditation on this very theme - its dedication reads 'For Denny Lynn, who likes to know what's true in my poems and what's "made up".' The balance, one feels, is overwhelmingly on the side of the true. This is writing of the highest order.

© Poetry Ireland Review, 2003