In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato teaches that perceptions are like shadows of reality. But for Inverness poet Denis Bold, those shadows are real.
“I know/if you are/only shadow/or maybe/smoke/or a blackness’s/stealth/across lonely/deaf walls,/you are still/real, you’re/real, you/and the fire,” he writes in Plato’s Cave, one of 62 poems in his new book, “Hinge,” self-published last month.
Plato’s Cave is emblematic of Mr. Bold’s collection in many ways, touching on themes that run through its pages: solitude, truth in darkness, the complexity of the past and its continued glow in the present.
“We can go on in our lives and think that this or that experience had little consequence,” Mr. Bold said last month over a cup of tea. “[But] they are as real—the shadow is as real as what it is the shadow of.”
Mr. Bold has written poetry since his college years, and throughout his career as a chef; he was the head chef at the Station House Café for over two decades before he retired in 2005. But this collection—assembled from pieces written over the last 15 years and whittled down to their barest essences—is his first.
In some poems, the tug of the past is illuminated through famous tales of looking back: the biblical tale of Lot and the Greek myth of Orpheus.
Indeed, yearning for the past is central to the human experience, Mr. Bold’s poems suggest. In Salt, he alludes to the biblical character who disobeys God’s order by turning to look at his wife as they flee Sodom, writing, we “cry for lots/of reasons/because we’re/told to/not look back/and we do/at what we love/and hate and/think we’ll miss.”
Two other poems refer to the similar myth of Orpheus, whose wife is sent to Hades after he glances over his shoulder at her as the two escape the underworld. “New gods are/making deals/all the time/we ask is it/too much,/too much to ask/to be returned/the unreturned./I know./I know,” he muses in a poem called Orpheus Looks Back.
Another central duality in the collection is light and dark. The collection is full of different embodiments of darkness: storms, the night sky, shadows, smoke, crows. As in Plato’s Cave, Mr. Bold’s darkness is not malevolent; sometimes it is revelatory, at other moments simply a fact of life.
The poem Crows was inspired in part by a sudden infestation of crows in his neighborhood many years ago, a difficult time in his life just before he left his post at the Station House. “There was this cacophony all the time,” Mr. Bold said. “I thought it was telling me something, or manifesting something that I was feeling.”
But the meaning of darkness—whatever it might be—hinges on the existence of its opposite, light. The brightness of stars that can guide us home relies on the night, after all, he writes.
But it’s also possible to lose oneself in absolute light, as he alludes to in poems like White, one of the sparest in the collection. Mr. Bold said even he is confused by the piece, though he believes it’s about being lost. The poem, which begins “What is/white/is lost/in white,” and with its references to preservatives like salt and ice, seems also to muse on being frozen or trapped by memory.
In a way, every poem is a memory—of a feeling, a place, a moment. Mr. Bold, a private man, said he hesitated in publishing the poems; he pursued a book in the end because it was a way of releasing the pieces so he can move on to new subjects.
It’s a concept he explores in Oyster, which touches on the bivalve’s desire of the mollusk to hold onto its pearl but also to show it to the world. He called the poem the most important in the collection.
The bittersweet feeling of release is also poignantly evoked in The Last Yellow Apples, in which he writes that “bruised suns/wait beyond/the unkind/purposes/of clocks…the tree/whispers/if you let go/I’ll let go/they let go.”
Perhaps the form of his poems themselves best evoke the dualities that concern him. The lines are so short—one to four words, the longest just an inch across—that they appear to both balance on top of each other but also to fall down the page, as if gracefully letting go, line by line.
Denis Bold’s “Hinge” is available at Point Reyes Books.