Been a while since I’ve done a Missouri Review, so I’ll do the Summer 2016 issue. The first poem, by poet William Woolfitt, is “Field Holler.” “Because the field was galled, blotched with yellow hardpan…he had to fork and spread pond ooze.” Stanza one is a statement of facts about a farm hand singing as he works. Stanza two is about a woman singing as she weeds a garden. The poem ends when they hear each other. It’s the plain details of their lives that give resonance, the loblolly, frostweed, broomsedge. Only the very last word of the poem brings us to a sudden depth, a vision of their world beyond this plain place. Woolfitt’s other poems here mine the same vein, showing black workers and prisoners singing as they work, blues, spirituals, and hollers. These are poems not so much looking for an epiphany, as generating emotions out of the minutiae of grinding life. “He cradles and counts // bones and the splinters of bones.” Reminding us how tough life was, back in the day.
Corey Van Landingham gives us “Taking Down the Bridge,” which starts with an arresting image. “Treasure Island is on fire.” Okay, we want to know more. “Or so it seems, torches smoking / through the cantilever truss, / hiding even the men…” a series of provoking statements keeps us reading on. “the old bridge is cut in two… How quickly we abandon the past.” We get the sense of impermanence, of valuable things being lost. Then, “You told me / how you would bring old relics…an antique shoehorn…” and a sadness slowly grows. “…the earrings that will…be made from / the…picked-apart skeleton…will reflect / nothing…”
Finally, Peter Cooley gives us “Hunter’s Moon.” “He will not always be here in the fall.” It is a poem made out of denials, in a sense. “He’s not the world’s witness to this.” A lyric poem about a man trying to reassure himself he fits in, perhaps. But things are going on, things are changing, and much is uncertain. There is a certain absurdity running through Cooley’s world. In “Interpolations,” he references the mountains of New Orleans, and: “The countries beyond imaginations’ grasp.” It is an uneasy place, but one worth visiting, for the thought-provoking ideas, and the disturbing familiarity.
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson
P.S. Please consider buying my book of love poems, “Against The Night,” available now as an e-Book.
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