The Wake of the Electron

Donald Finkel

The Wake of the Electron is billed as a narrative poem, but is in fact a collection. Good news for those who don't like long poems.

The Wake of the Electron, Finkel's eleventh collection of poetry, is the story of Donald Crowhurst, a sailor who, while in the 1969 Sunday Times Golden Globe round-the-world sailrace, seems to have gone insane, sailing from Britain down to the southern tip of South America, then turning course back into the Atlantic and setting himself adrift for about eight months. His boat, the Electron, was discovered by a British mail ship in the middle of the Sargasso Sea, with Crowhurst nowhere in sight. He remains undiscovered to this day, but left behind a journal, from which The Wake of the Electron quotes extensively—not long passages as Williams does in Paterson, but in lines and sentences that, more often than not, Finkel integrates into his poems. The result is a structuring of Crowhurst's alleged insanity, and a fictive retelling of what went on in Crowhurst's mind during the eight months (or less, depending on when he left the ship; current scholarship's best estimate is July 1, nine days before the ship was discovered abandoned) he drifted aimlessly in the Atlantic.

The result is a fine collection of poems. Finkel combines a strong narrative voice and an obvious grasp of the craft of poetry with compelling subject matter, and the book is a success. At the very least, it should provoke the reader into wanting to read Tomalin and Hall's The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (now considered a Modern Classic). As poetry, though, it stands on its own with no outside research necessary by the reader. (Note: photos of the Electron taken in 1991 can be found at ianmurray.net/TeignmouthElectronThumbs.html. I had no idea the boat was so small, and this did bring the poems into sharper focus for me after I saw the boat itself, but that didn't happen until after I'd finished reading it through for the first time.)