Aoife O’Donovan’s Bull Frogs Croon sets three of Peter Sears’ poems to music. I didn’t know this when I heard the album (I eventually learned from this review), but the first two lines alone arrested me as undeniably poetic: “The water is a glaze / like loneliness at ease with itself.” I was not surprised when I learned the lyrics are poetry set to music, and moreover that the poet is from the Pacific Northwest.

Water, rain, and trees figure prominently in the imagery. “There is nothing wrong with rain” sounds like a line originating from someone who has lived where rain falls 155 days per year. But the geographic connection is also a matter of mood. With such lush, rain-nourished trees, the forests here are pervaded with quiet presence but also haunted by absence.

The orchestral arrangements call to mind these coastal temperate rainforests—exquisite sound resonating in hollow wood frames. The EP’s string arrangements by Jeremy Kittel are dynamic and dulcet, haunting and wistful. Aoife O’Donovan’s voice is nimble and warm as always. The EP came out in March 2020 and thus had the unanticipated effect of being a companion for me in the early days of lockdown life.

i. “Night Fishing”

“The water is a glaze / like loneliness at ease with itself.”

Here are those lines again, and the music almost pauses to let them sink in. I’m hooked. I’m taken aback with recognition.

Nearly every evening for the last three years, I’ve walked to the Camosun Bog. A constructed wooden boardwalk allows visitors to circle the fragile ecosystem without damaging it. I walk past wild blackberry bushes and power lines, and my feet leave the dirt path for the wooden walkway. Western hemlock, Douglas fir, and Western red cedars encircle the mossy bog’s center where a variety of comparatively small bushes grow: Labrador tea, cloudberry, bog cranberries, even the carnivorous sundew. Most of the year, rainwater collects in the center of this mossy hollow. Occasionally you can hear or see frogs there.

I’ve been here in all seasons and nearly every mood. I came here faithfully two years ago when I was so waterlogged by heartbreak that I couldn’t leave the house without tissues in every coat pocket. Then I’d forget to put new ones in, and when I felt the beginnings of tears pricking behind my eyes, I’d reach into my pocket and find some crumpled up tissues with charcoal traces of the previous week’s mascara.

I walked the boardwalk this spring when I came back from spending time with someone else. I’d asked him to meet me in the middle of the forest. He obliged, and when we parted ways, he said, “Let me know if you do any group activities this summer.” I wound through the bog on my way home. I stopped to look at the reflection of the trees in the water and to take several deep breaths. I’d just done a courageous thing. So what if his response was not what I had hoped? I’m here. That’s enough.

ii. “The Darkness”
“hands in front of your face / to feel your way down”

I listen obsessively to music I love. My sister tells me that my instinct to listen almost exclusively to entire albums rather than playlists is “delightfully old school.” Bull Frogs Croon contains a suite with three movements and then includes the three movements as separate tracks, as if to anticipate my urge to listen again and again.

The EP was released just as I needed to finish my final paper for my final class in a program I loved but which has prepared me for no occupation in particular. My life was already poised to enter an era of uncertainty, with or without a pandemic. But before I could turn my full attention to my future, I had to write a paper whose topic was entirely of my choosing. I’d chosen Simone Weil’s theology of affliction.

Simone Weil said of her reading habits that “as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.”

This also describes how I read and how I listen. I first read Weil’s Waiting for God last Christmas. She writes with such authority and authenticity that she had me in her grip. I renewed the book the maximum number of times from the library. I did not want to break the spell.

There is an austerity to Weil’s thought that privileges the cross, the void, the “infinite distance” between God and creation, the absence of God that God experiences in the Incarnation. In the Incarnation, God did not avoid suffering. In her own life, neither did Weil.

As surreal and murky as those first months of pandemic life felt, immersing myself in both Weil’s incisive dictums and O’Donovan’s exquisite music helped me to accept this state of affairs and focus on writing that last paper.

iii. “Valentine”
“Big frogs croak
Baby frogs slither;
I’d rather go broke
Than not be with her”

The juxtaposition of amphibians with a declaration of love is playful, delightful—and realistic. Something about the loneliness of “Night Fishing” is both answered and echoed here. We don’t know if the beloved returns this declaration. But amphibian life goes on, unchanged by this longing, whether it is requited or not.

When I did my taxes this spring, I was shocked at how little I made last year. I lacked for nothing, but I lived simply. I worked student jobs that allowed me the mental space to devote to my studies and to my poetry. I’d make the choice all over again, echoing the last line of Mary Oliver’s “The Summer’s Day”: “Tell me, what else would I have done?” Devotion calls for sacrifice, but love makes that sacrifice a joy and a no-brainer. Weil again: “What does suffering take from him who is without joy?”

The string arrangement on this track is sweet, and the final note, almost an enharmonic out of audible range, fades softly, indiscriminately into silence.

For whatever reasons—and I’ve learned ascribing reasons is only trouble—I’ve been unlucky in love. My declarations in this realm have been met with silence. I’m slowly learning to believe that these responses do not reflect the quality of the gift or the giver, anymore than it does for the voice in this poem/song. The offering itself has value.
Regardless, the slugs and frogs of the Camosun Bog slither, croak, and croon.

I’ll keep listening.