Reviewed by: Making Landfall by Paul Lindholdt O. Alan Weltzien (bio) Making Landfall paul lindholdt Farmington, ME: Encircle, 2018 74 pp. Paul Lindholdt, longtime English professor at Eastern Washington University, has made a name for himself as a talented essayist through collections such as In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau (U of Iowa P, 2011), which received a Washington State Book Award, and Explorations in Ecocriticism: Advocacy, Bioregionalism, and Visual Design (Lexington, 2015). With Making Landfall, Lindholdt demonstrates his talents as a poet. This collection distills much of his graduate work in early American literature. Fruit of many years' work, it focuses upon everyday life in the seventeenth-century Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay. Given this unusual setting, the collection gives voice to the unvoiced in that long-ago experiment in Protestant theocracy. For instance, in the colony, unsurprisingly, women functioned as distinctly second-class citizens. One of Lindholdt's strengths in this collection consists in his devotion to female experience, as a number of his poems give women a powerful voice they historically lacked. Often, it invokes their sexuality (see "Sarah Hawkridge," "Another Wild," "Rebecca Glover," "Mary Dyer," "Moll Gone," "The Glare of Her Awareness," "Benediction," and "Marianne's Quarters"). Lindholdt also gives King Phillip, the Wampanoag chief, a poem ("King Phillip" 9). Another poem, written in the voice of a Puritan settler, "The Great Swamp Fight from the Pulpit Construed," ironically justifies King Phillip's War (1675–76), which decimated the Wampanoag tribe, as justification of the Puritan mission: "As pitiful as their cries / among the flames, scriptures declared them good. / We are the avenging sword of Leviticus today" (65 lines 29–31). Though Making Landfall does include a roll call of famous male settler figures across several generations (Thomas Morton, John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards, for instance), the greater number of poems devoted to "unknowns" and the socially marginalized give the collection its distinction. Sometimes they read like muted dramatic monologues and their stories grant them the hegemony they historically lacked. Lindholdt divides his book into five parts: "Brooding Season," "Line of Descent," "Flowers Washed in Our Wake," "When Land Grows Fat," [End Page 857] and "Merchant Saints." He pulls some of his part epigraphs from three twentieth-century American poets: John Ashbery, Rita Dove, and Patricia Goedicke; these epigraphs are balanced by those drawn from the work of Puritan historian William Bradford for the third part, "Flowers Washed in Our Wake," and pioneering psychologist William James for the fifth part, "Merchant Saints." Additionally, Lindholdt includes five pages of notes that provide succinct historical contexts for the majority of the poems. In a sense, each note has served as a prompt for the poems. Lindholdt usually writes in stanzas ranging from tercets to ten lines, and he deftly uses assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme (and sometimes, at line ends, near rhyme) to underline his occasional blank verse. Occasionally his subjects take us beyond Boston or focus upon elements within the seventeenth-century natural landscape (e.g. "Tenochtitlan," "Ouzel," "Crossing Arbon Valley," "The Hawthorne Tree"). All told, Making Land-fall opens a fascinating window upon a local society impossibly removed from us. Except, it turns out, it's not. "Anniversary" celebrates the trysting site, a "ramshackle beach shed," where husband and wife return after twelve years of marriage. The poem evokes their private love, itself godly: Now the roof planks bang above usbeaming. Thistles nod.Laughter is a bright canzone, sweetness,the liquid melodythat gathers, clusters, refuses to fall. (52, lines 15–19) The ways in which Making Landfall dismantles a monolithic view of Puritan life recommends it highly to anyone interested in early American history, particularly its literary representations. In Lindholdt's imagining, men and women, famed or obscure, are driven by frustrations and pleasures similar to our own. The focus upon sexual experience, for example, subverts the view many of us might hold, one derived from Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction, for example, that Puritans in their single-minded devotion to prayer and godliness ignored the tugs and joys of the flesh. Making Landfall makes the Puritans real, rather than grim repressed caricatures who wear black and either manually work...