Panning for Poems: netting some nuggets

                                                          
     I recently checked out four volumes of poetry from my local library.  They are: Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey (2006, a Pulitzer Prize awardee); Breakwater, Catherine Savage Brosman (2009); American Rendering, Andrew Hudgins (2010); and Inseminating the Elephant, Lucia Perillo (2009).  Right off the bat I think we can agree that the winner (I keep typing sinner) for best title is Inseminating the Elephant if we use vividness of imagery as the criterion.

     Why did I emerge with these four books of poetry (and three other books of different genres) when I had nothing in mind when I entered the library.  I emerged with seven volumes in tow because I had nothing in mind when I entered what is still holy ground, e-books and the internet notwithstanding.  The old word for this is serendipity. A phrase I would offer is a simple one, “informed browsing.”  I let my eye be caught by author’s names I do not immediately recognize or recall. But they have to have some credentials—testimonials from other writers or reviewers, a publisher of note, previous publications, even the way the book is set up, epigraph-ed and dedicated can yield a sense of substance—that increase the chance of finding something fresh.  And I did with these four.  They’re all good poets with distinctive voices.

      Brosman is a formalist who unexpectedly appends an odd Postface in Prose at the close of her volume; it’s a personal essay, “Lightning in the Heart.”  It’s about a rekindled love affair late in life and she connects it to her poem, “To Former Students, Who Would Be Skeptical” of their teacher’s passion. I think she doth presume too much about students’ active response to “this comment by a sage:/To fall in love is good at any age.” I prefer her work in its more buttoned mode, her paeans to Mina Loy, Madeleine Gide, and D.H. Lawrence.

     Trethewey is a young Southern poet.  Black soldiers in the Civil War (Native Guard)  
capture her attention and she shapes their stories through their voices in Parts II and III of this slim volme. In “Pastoral” Trethewey dreams she is in blackface and declares “My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.  They answer in the last line: “You don’t hate the south? they ask. You don’t hate it?”  Thus she deftly alludes to Faulkner’s Quentin Compson who makes a similar statement at the end of the novel, Absalom, Absalom. Part I is stand alone and has an autobiographical feel to it especially in “Genus Narcissus,” “Graveyard Blues” and “After Your Death.”  Her mother constitutes the presence of absence in these poems.

     Perillo, our “winner of best title” is a poet in a wheelchair, something neither she nor her poems draw much attention to.  She has a sassy style.  She will mix the colloquial and the ruminative as in this example from “Transcendentalism.”  The setting is a class on Emerson. “I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too, / a quiet little interlude from everyone outside/ rooting up the corpse of literature / for being too Caucasian.”

    Hudgins is better than good.  American Rendering is a full and accomplished volume of “New and Selected Poems.”  Many of his poems have a narrative center and so they unfold in a way that folds you into the story.  He is unafraid of the profane and the erotic, and he’s interested in Saints and Strangers, to borrow the name of a section of this collection taken from his previous book with that title.
      “Lorraine’s Song” will startle.  It involves sex through the knothole of a fence with a boy on one side and a mocking girl on the other.  Yes, it describes exactly what you think it does.  However, ardor is dashed by the choice of “mouth or knife.”  Feeling lucky fella?  The amalgam of lust and loathing moves into an equally surprising combination of opposites depicting singing and violence in a church.  A young girl watches in horror as intruders attack and beat her father, the minister.  She, though unable to move, leads the congregation to lift their voices in “Amazing Grace” until the beating ends and the attackers leave.  There is more in this section about the girl and her preacher-father as she grows up and those poems will attach themselves to the ear in your mind.

     So this panning for poetic pleasures yielded some nuggets, and put me in mind of William Carlos Williams’ famous lines from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower":  “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." 

     Find the necessary news from the muse.