Poetry review – THE BAY: Charles Rammelkamp discovers perceptive insights and observations in David Dodd Lee’s new collection
The Bay
David Dodd Lee
Broadstone Books, 2025
$30.00 102 pages
ISBN: 978-1966677093
David Dodd Lee writes in several voices, but my favorite is the stream-of-consciousness one that you find in poems like “Lowlands,” “Midnight Special,” “The Bullfrog,” “Unrepentant Moon” (from part two, “Varieties of Escapism”) and in “Perfect” and “Estrangement” (from part four, “Unpaved”). The poem, “Varieties of Escapism,” begins:
It’s interesting and/or upsetting to know mites live in
all glands on our faces they cling to hair follicles you cannot
wash them off they colonize you who keeps talking
studying documents water skiing making love
weeping ah the stain of reality arriving via cable news
tonight add to that the fact that dust mites are crapping on
our pillows it’s science! which is why we write poems…
Lee’s main theme, indeed, is nature. The quotation from Jackson Pollock that is the title of one of the poems from the fourth part sums it up nicely: ”I don’t paint nature. I am nature.” The poem “Great Horned Owl” captures this mood. It starts:
“I don’t know,” he told me. “Since she left
it feels like I’m floating outside my body. Or like I’m not me
but an animal, a deer or an owl,
and I’m walking around or sitting on a branch
with snow on top of my head
watching everything, including this man, the one
in the house by the pond…
The poem ends with the speaker, who becomes the owl, describing his reactions to watching the man, who is also the speaker:
. how he seems oddly at peace—and for the first time all day I feel happy.
David Dodd Lee’s poems are full of nature, from the fish – the pike, the gars, the crappies, the salmon, the sunfish – to the birds – robins, cardinals, indigo buntings, turkey vultures, barn swallows, crows, herons, geese (man, are there geese!) – and his late cat Maxine.
“The Bay,” from which the collection takes its title, is an eleven-part meditation on humans and nature, including “Who is the Squatter?,” which opens on an imagist verse of a warbler going about its business in the mulberry trees and among the tiger lilies, then a white-tailed deer nibbling ‘my’ hostas. (Who was here first?)
“Perfect” expresses the dichotomy between human and animal succinctly. It begins: ‘Birds don’t have a bad side but people do I do you do we all do.’ In the amusing verses that follow Lee goes on to mention the perfection of the cardinal captured in a photograph: ‘it’s not a human being and / doesn’t suffer low levels of self-esteem’ whereas unflattering images of oneself can ruin one’s day, though ‘I’ve seen others / and felt like a rock star who needs to be reminded either way / what a putz you are keeping track on Instagram.’ The poem ends with the poet extolling
the magpies a magpie is perfect a cardinal is perfect a barn
owl with its wings outspread doesn’t need a Botox injection
a chickadee doesn’t have a good side it can withstand cold
weather while still looking fabulous you or I’d need a sweater
As already must seem evident, nature is not just a “thing” in David Dodd Lee’s poetry but often functions as metaphor. You see this in “The Face of the Ocean Sunfish II” and “Estrangement,” in which human relations are captured in the depiction of the behavior of praying mantises. ‘Until they’re released into the wild, baby praying mantises / will begin cannibalizing each other.’ Lee goes on to describe his estrangement from his mother, suggesting that old phrase that’s often linked to Aesop’s fable, “The Fox and the Lion,” to wit, familiarity breeds contempt. He writes: ‘My mother phoned
me (at my new job), a voice squirming through pinholes,
asking, Who do you think you’re trying to impress?
I’d managed to avoid her for fifteen years at that point.
“Cremains” is about the disposition of his mother’s ashes after she has died, ‘a story of regret / and oncology.’ You hear the poet’s implicit mourning in the final lines, ‘Oh mother, what you can’t
hear is the drowning of my sorrow now as you couldn’t
hear it in my absence. Missed chances. But not just ours.
“Planing the Days” also uses metaphor to make its point. It opens on the speaker down on his hands and knees, goggles covering his eyes, as he uses an orbital sander to remove the layers of varnish and grease and dirt in order to get down to the wood surface, while MSNBC is on in the background and ‘the whole Trump thing turning banana republic.’ The poem ends on the planing metaphor:
I don’t know what’s going to happen to us in this country
I’m not getting to the bottom of anything I can’t start over
again it’s all a mirage I’m just scraping the crud off the top
As is surely evident, David Dodd Lee has a whimsical sense of humor that imbues his poetry with a feeling of good-fellowship and a quiet sense of urgency. The Bay is a thoughtful meditation on life in the twenty-first century, and underlying that, what it means to be human, the responsibilities and the rewards.
Jun 25 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – David Dodd Lee
Poetry review – THE BAY: Charles Rammelkamp discovers perceptive insights and observations in David Dodd Lee’s new collection
The Bay
David Dodd Lee
Broadstone Books, 2025
$30.00 102 pages
ISBN: 978-1966677093
David Dodd Lee writes in several voices, but my favorite is the stream-of-consciousness one that you find in poems like “Lowlands,” “Midnight Special,” “The Bullfrog,” “Unrepentant Moon” (from part two, “Varieties of Escapism”) and in “Perfect” and “Estrangement” (from part four, “Unpaved”). The poem, “Varieties of Escapism,” begins:
It’s interesting and/or upsetting to know mites live in
all glands on our faces they cling to hair follicles you cannot
wash them off they colonize you who keeps talking
studying documents water skiing making love
weeping ah the stain of reality arriving via cable news
tonight add to that the fact that dust mites are crapping on
our pillows it’s science! which is why we write poems…
Lee’s main theme, indeed, is nature. The quotation from Jackson Pollock that is the title of one of the poems from the fourth part sums it up nicely: ”I don’t paint nature. I am nature.” The poem “Great Horned Owl” captures this mood. It starts:
“I don’t know,” he told me. “Since she left
it feels like I’m floating outside my body. Or like I’m not me
but an animal, a deer or an owl,
and I’m walking around or sitting on a branch
with snow on top of my head
watching everything, including this man, the one
in the house by the pond…
The poem ends with the speaker, who becomes the owl, describing his reactions to watching the man, who is also the speaker:
. how he seems oddly at peace—and for the first time all day I feel happy.
David Dodd Lee’s poems are full of nature, from the fish – the pike, the gars, the crappies, the salmon, the sunfish – to the birds – robins, cardinals, indigo buntings, turkey vultures, barn swallows, crows, herons, geese (man, are there geese!) – and his late cat Maxine.
“The Bay,” from which the collection takes its title, is an eleven-part meditation on humans and nature, including “Who is the Squatter?,” which opens on an imagist verse of a warbler going about its business in the mulberry trees and among the tiger lilies, then a white-tailed deer nibbling ‘my’ hostas. (Who was here first?)
“Perfect” expresses the dichotomy between human and animal succinctly. It begins: ‘Birds don’t have a bad side but people do I do you do we all do.’ In the amusing verses that follow Lee goes on to mention the perfection of the cardinal captured in a photograph: ‘it’s not a human being and / doesn’t suffer low levels of self-esteem’ whereas unflattering images of oneself can ruin one’s day, though ‘I’ve seen others / and felt like a rock star who needs to be reminded either way / what a putz you are keeping track on Instagram.’ The poem ends with the poet extolling
the magpies a magpie is perfect a cardinal is perfect a barn
owl with its wings outspread doesn’t need a Botox injection
a chickadee doesn’t have a good side it can withstand cold
weather while still looking fabulous you or I’d need a sweater
As already must seem evident, nature is not just a “thing” in David Dodd Lee’s poetry but often functions as metaphor. You see this in “The Face of the Ocean Sunfish II” and “Estrangement,” in which human relations are captured in the depiction of the behavior of praying mantises. ‘Until they’re released into the wild, baby praying mantises / will begin cannibalizing each other.’ Lee goes on to describe his estrangement from his mother, suggesting that old phrase that’s often linked to Aesop’s fable, “The Fox and the Lion,” to wit, familiarity breeds contempt. He writes: ‘My mother phoned
me (at my new job), a voice squirming through pinholes,
asking, Who do you think you’re trying to impress?
I’d managed to avoid her for fifteen years at that point.
“Cremains” is about the disposition of his mother’s ashes after she has died, ‘a story of regret / and oncology.’ You hear the poet’s implicit mourning in the final lines, ‘Oh mother, what you can’t
hear is the drowning of my sorrow now as you couldn’t
hear it in my absence. Missed chances. But not just ours.
“Planing the Days” also uses metaphor to make its point. It opens on the speaker down on his hands and knees, goggles covering his eyes, as he uses an orbital sander to remove the layers of varnish and grease and dirt in order to get down to the wood surface, while MSNBC is on in the background and ‘the whole Trump thing turning banana republic.’ The poem ends on the planing metaphor:
I don’t know what’s going to happen to us in this country
I’m not getting to the bottom of anything I can’t start over
again it’s all a mirage I’m just scraping the crud off the top
As is surely evident, David Dodd Lee has a whimsical sense of humor that imbues his poetry with a feeling of good-fellowship and a quiet sense of urgency. The Bay is a thoughtful meditation on life in the twenty-first century, and underlying that, what it means to be human, the responsibilities and the rewards.