Most of «Speciman» reads like a naturalist's field catalogue. D. L. Emblen opens with fish that flash "green and yellow sides below Seal Rock," then keeps piling up sea creatures until the page feels as crowded as a tide-pool. Only in the final lines does the catalogue turn, and the turn is a joke with real tenderness in it: after all these marvels, the "stranger thing" is a human being, "one old man" floating face down on a paddle board in bright green gloves.
The poem's central idea is a reversal of who counts as the specimen. The title promises a sample to be examined, and for most of the poem we assume the specimens are the fish and the anemones. By the end, the observer has become the observed. The man is treated with the same wide-eyed cataloguing curiosity as the "creatures with foot-less legs," and the effect is to fold him back into the ecosystem he is studying. He is no distant scientist on the shore but one more odd animal in the "seething sea-jungle."
The construction does most of the work. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines stretch and contract like the tide itself, and the long ones, such as "fish with nostrils close together, bulbous eyes and cordate teeth," have a breathless, list-making momentum. Emblen leans on the word "fish" and on repeated "with" phrases, so that the opening sounds almost like incantation: fish with this, fish with that, forms upon forms. That accumulation is the point. We are meant to feel overwhelmed by variety, so that the sudden singular "one old man" lands with real force against all the plural abundance.
The imagery is precise and surprisingly physical. Some of it is scientific, with "cordate" (heart-shaped) teeth, isopods, chitons, limpet cones. Some is startlingly poetic: "soft circle splashes of their air-gulping," or "pink transparent bubbles of creatures," or things that "drift like water-swollen leaves." The poem often blurs categories, so that the sea animals are given legs, arms, swords and shovels, as though the ocean were improvising bodies from a toolbox. Then, in the final image, the man receives the same treatment. His "long brown body" is described almost as an animal's would be, and his gloves, "bright green wide-webbed," turn his hands into something like fins or webbed feet. He is not described as wearing equipment so much as growing it.
Verbs of movement and light keep the scene alive. The rocks are "alive with moving pods and shells," the water is "flushing and receding," the sunlight is "germinating," a lovely word that makes even the morning feel biological, as if light were a seed in the fog. The man "floats" and "sculls diagonally," a slightly comic, deliberate phrase that suggests unhurried, slightly eccentric purpose. Notice, too, the small detail that he swims "face down." He is looking into the very world the poem has been cataloguing. In a quiet way, he is doing exactly what the speaker has been doing all along: staring at the water and marvelling.
That may be what makes the poem more than a clever reversal. The humour is gentle. "No stranger thing" could be mockery, but the word "old" and the care in describing his gloves suggest affection, even kinship. The speaker seems to recognise in the swimmer a fellow enthusiast, someone whose strangeness is simply the visible form of curiosity. The poem's last line, with its bright green gloves, leaves a vivid, almost cartoonish picture against all the darker, subtler colours of the tide-pool.
The poem's significance lies in this shift of perspective. It reminds us that careful attention to nature does not require standing apart from it, and that the person who looks hardest at the living world may end up looking, to an outsider, like part of its oddness. It invites us to see ourselves as inhabitants of the scene rather than spectators, and it does so with a light touch, a long catalogue, and one perfectly placed punchline.