Two Fishers, and Other Poems — Reading Companion

Conversational Address and Shifting Registers

Palmer frequently adopts a direct, intimate tone, addressing a named companion ('Charley') or a lost friend ('I once had the trustiest comrade'). This device creates a sense of shared memory, but the register shifts abruptly. In 'Two Fishers,' the speaker's pastoral promises ('All our days will shine with gladness') are followed by a bawdy train scene ('We were all drunk as blaz...')—the line breaks off, suggesting a deliberate truncation of the comic. Elsewhere, the language turns stark: 'He lay wounded in the desert where the thirsty sand gleamed red.' The contrast between the colloquial and the brutal is a structural feature, not a flaw.

Nature as Antagonist and Refuge

Nature in these poems is neither consistently benign nor merely symbolic. In 'Two Fishers,' the landscape is restorative—'God's own land for the nimble trout'—but the speaker also describes Nature as 'a warrior / With pricking glaive and spear' that drives Grief away. In 'Talking Water,' the brooks offer solace: 'What need has a weary man's spirit / With phrases from books!' Yet in 'A poet lay dead,' the natural world mirrors human grief: the lark 'saw Him perching high upon the moon / With the most dreadful anguish in His eyes.' Palmer avoids simple personification; the natural world is active, sometimes violent, and its moods shift with the speaker's.

War's Aftermath in Memory and Prophecy

The collection repeatedly returns to the war's psychological residue. 'Prophecy' imagines a post-war renewal ('The Earth will sing like a lover'), but its optimism is tempered by the preceding poems' images of broken bodies and lost comrades. 'A Sinn Feiner' mourns a friend 'knit to the whirlwind' who 'joyfully go forth to die,' leaving the speaker bereft. 'The Foreign Legionary, 1911' depicts a man 'chased from Europe whom the world denied a soul,' bleaching in the desert. These poems do not form a linear narrative; instead, they circle the same wound from different angles—memory, prophecy, and stark reportage.

Readers should attend to Palmer's use of truncated lines and sudden tonal shifts, which often signal a fracture in the speaker's composure. The poems reward slow reading: a seemingly simple quatrain may conceal a bitter irony or a withheld emotion. The collection's brevity—under 7,500 words—invites rereading to trace how the same images (fishing, rivers, birds, the 'whirlwind') recur with altered meanings across different poems.

Reading Palmer’s war-haunted calm, I kept thinking how silence carries more than noise. That same ache surfaces in Amores: Poems — A Reader’s Guide, where love feels just as fragile as a soldier’s pause between fields. Both collections leave you holding a breath you didn’t know you’d taken. Strange, how old words still find us there.