"Three for a New Daughter" by David Walker

January 5, 2022 Poet and art writer Carl Little lives and writes on Mount Desert Island. For his Read & Loved selection he highlights David Walker’s poem “Three for a New Daughter” which appeared in his poetry collection Moving Out. Little has this to say about the piece:

A couple of years ago I bought a copy of David Walker’s Moving Out. I had heard about Walker here and there since moving to Maine in 1989 but had never sat down with his poems. I recently finally jumped in.

Moving Out is full of gems. As Richard Eberhart notes in his foreword, “[The poems] are strong, of a rare kind of simplicity, and have deep realizations that make them seem like permanent parts of our knowledge.”

I keep returning to the poem “Three for a New Daughter,” a trio of lovely evocations of fatherhood. The first part, “A Prayer, A Welcome,” begins, “Little wrinkle / from my flesh,” and ends with this request: “teach me to hold / you for a while / and then // to let go.” The second part, “The Beast of Burden,” describes an “enfant / terrible beating time” on her father’s head as he carries her on his shoulders while the third, “The Naming,” riffs on her name, Emma Shea Jewett Walker. It begins, “Old names we dress you in, like / family heirlooms….”

The poem brought to mind Stanley Kunitz’s stunning “Journal for My Daughter,” the opening poem of The Testing Tree (1971). Like Walker, Kunitz speaks of the joys and trials of being a father. Both poets bring tenderness and truth to their renderings of the relationship, something for which I as a father of a daughter am grateful.

Born in Alna, Maine, and a Bowdoin graduate, Walker, who taught for many years at USM, died unexpectedly at his home in Waterville in 2008 at age 65. His poetry lives on.

You can read “Three for a New Daughter” in the anthology The Maine Poets (2006)

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