Most poems about echoes are about calling out and hearing yourself come back. Dave Bonta turns this around. His speaker sits "alone in my shed" and repeats "the words / of the echo", so the sound arrives first and the human voice follows. The poem is about a solitary person who finds that the quiet around him is full of voices, some of them his own, and that an echo can carry more than sound.
The title sets this up. "Echo location" splits the single word "echolocation", the way bats and dolphins find their surroundings through returning sound, into two words, "echo" and "location". The title asks where this echo is and where the speaker is. The poem gives a deliberately strange answer. The speaker is in a shed, then a "quiet garden", then somewhere near "the sea", then "in the water" and finally "in myself". Each stanza moves the speaker's position a little further inward.
The central image comes in the second stanza: the echo is "clear as the sea / delivered late at night / in a quiet garden". It is a surprising comparison, since a garden is not a shore, and the poem never explains it. Clarity belongs to water, so the sea stands for a sound that is transparent and deep at once. The word "delivered" also deserves attention. It suggests a parcel or a message arriving, and it can also suggest birth, which prepares for the children in the last stanza. I read that second meaning as an inference rather than something the poem states. The mood is gentle, as though the night has handed the speaker something he did not order.
The final stanza turns the poem. The echo is "making me hear / children in the water / and in myself". The grammar is worth noticing. "Making me hear" hangs on from the previous stanza without a full stop, so the sentence flows through all nine lines like the sound it describes. The poem does not say whose children these are or whether the voices are remembered or imagined. "In the water" could mean a beach, a pool or a river, and "in myself" could mean the speaker's own childhood, or something he carries in his body. The poem keeps all of these possibilities open. What it makes clear is that the solitude of the first line is not as complete as it seemed.
The construction supports this. There are three tercets with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, which makes the poem feel like quiet speech or a thought. The lines are short, and the middle line of each stanza tends to run a little longer ("delivered late at night", "children in the water"), so each stanza swells slightly before it settles. The poem also echoes itself. "Clear" in the second stanza is answered by "hear" in the third, which almost rhymes across the break. "Sea" at the end of one line has a faint answer in "me" at the start of the next stanza. The phrase "in a quiet garden" is followed by "in the water" and "in myself", so the little word "in" repeats like a returning sound and moves from outer places to inner ones. A poem about echoes is quietly built from small repetitions.
The key words are plain: "alone", "repeat", "quiet", "hear", "children". Nothing is ornate. That plainness matters, because the poem's effect depends on the reader listening as the speaker does. The words are few, so each one gets room to ring.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does in so little space. In nine short lines it reverses the usual order of echo and speaker. It turns loneliness into a kind of company, and it moves from a cramped shed to open water and then to the inside of a person. It also shows that listening can be an act of discovery. The speaker does not shout and wait for an answer. He repeats what he hears, and that small act of attention is what lets him find the children in himself. For a reader, the poem is a reminder that quiet is rarely empty and that the voices we carry can surface at any hour.