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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 55 > Reviews >Pris Campbell's Sea Trails: Poems and 1977 Passage Notes

Sea Trails: Poems and 1977 Passage Notes
Pris Campbell
Lummox Press
ISBN Number: 978-1929878024

Reviewer: Janelle Adsit


          Pris Campbell’s Sea Trails can be described in many ways. A poetry book that is also an adventure tale, the work does not easily fall into a genre category. Rather, it is a multi-genre collection that includes fragmentary log entries, maps, glossaries, photos, and instructions for how to lay a trot line for catching crabs. In this patchwork of prose and verse, Sea Trails chronicles a six-month expedition down the Atlantic coast taken in 1977 by Campbell and her partner at the time.

          The account extends beyond the confines of the vessel; American history is recounted as the voyagers “moor next to the Mayflower within sight of Plymouth Rock” and later approach the twin towers that still “dress Manhattan’s skyline.” The sailors move “past where John Kennedy, Jr. is to later plunge/ to his death.” The penultimate passage of the book, “While We Were Gone,” lists major U.S. occurrences—including the death of Elvis Presley, the creation of the U.S. Department of Energy, and the launch of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2—that the mariners were removed from, being out at sea. The simple list of events hints at a land-based country that changed in Campbell’s absence. It also contextualizes Campbell’s experience.

          The book is an amalgamation of many things, and thus descriptions of Sea Trails might sound oxymoronic. The work is sometimes subtle, but the themes are easily identified. It asks to be carefully considered, but it’s also conversational. Many of the lines are straightforward and don’t lend themselves to much contemplation. (For instance, Campbell states of her lover, “My very own Adam,/ already tainted by original sin.” This is a hackneyed statement that offers little to catch the eye.) These more simple lines may share the page with those that invite a sustained study of language, such as Campbell’s glossary passages. In one such glossary segment, the words “tacking” or “coming about” are introduced. This nomenclature describes a sailing maneuver, but Campbell hints at these words’ ability to describe relational maneuvers as well. In her definition of these words, the body’s emotional and physical navigation becomes indistinguishable from a vessel made of sails and varnished wood.

          Campbell shows herself to be a dexterous writer. She invites many types of readers—those seeking something to inspire deep thought and those looking for a breezy page-turner. With chatty lines such as these from “Why I Stay,” the book is effortlessly read:
Growing up I had to eat vegetables
I disliked in order to get dessert after.
Maybe I generalized incorrectly
from that lesson.
          Reliably, Campbell is grounded and accessible. Often she is practical, willing to lay bare many details surrounding the trip. For Campbell, the time at sea can be described not in lofty imaginings, but in the nuts and bolts of job notices and budgets, in how a body climbs the stairs. Perhaps Campbell is forthcoming with information in order to convince that her aspiration was indeed realized. The first sentence of the book declares that the trip was the fulfillment of a dream, but perhaps the words on the pages that follow are meant to support that claim, describing the days of the trip with authenticating precision.

          This thin volume provides a wide-lens look at the two sailors and their sea. It includes the highs and lows of the couple’s stormy relationship and their shared adventure. Demonstrating multiple moods, Campbell often glints with wit. Poems such as “Divorce” add levity to the tension of the sailing couple’s deteriorating relationship:
Let’s just say
he went out
for hamburger
and came home
with a whopper.
          As this short poem makes clear, Campbell offers no-fuss verse. Her style reflects the rationed, undecorated lifestyle that the trip required. Although some of the poems were written thirty years after the trip, they are unquestionably located in the setting of “Little Adventure,” a Tanzer 22 fin keel sailboat. Campbell’s perception of the world, as it materializes in her poems, is utterly influenced by her surroundings. So thorough is Campbell’s located-ness that she measures time by Little Adventure’s sails:
We create what seems like love
in the V-berth each evening
and, sometimes, for a sail
flutter, it is again.
          The environment of boat and sea supplies the vehicle for much of Campbell’s figurative language: “He was my mainsail./ I was his boat, / bearing him to wild new shores.” Here, Campbell’s body morphs into a boat. And, reciprocally, elsewhere in the collection, Little Adventure becomes corporeal: “Our boat peels back her hull, reveals inner scars./ My heart laid open, she already knows mine.” Throughout the collection, the intimacy between Campbell and her sea vessel is emphasized.

          Although the trip is described retrospectively, Campbell is able to re-embody the time and place of her 1977 journey. The occurrences portrayed in this book are incarnated both in word and photos of Campbell taken during her journey. She is actualized as a figure pulling the line, hand over hand. Her sensations turn up on the page:
Saltwater rises through my body,
is transformed through its heat
into golden mist. I expand
without Alice’s cookies,
become a gull dropping clams
on the rocks to crack them.
          Campbell inhabits each of these poems so much so that one would hardly think to call the voice an impersonal “speaker.” She even calls her own name: “My theatre audience/ yells, leave, Pris, leave.” This a poet who comes through the page. The reader feels invited.

          The beauty of Sea Trails is that the poet has palpably merged the pleasure of being at sea and the pleasure of telling about it. The journey, Campbell writes in the afterword, “became a song I still sing.” And the tune is satisfying. Thanks go to Lummox Press for amplifying Campbell’s melody.
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