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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE THIRTY: Oct-Dec (05) > Reviews >Steven R. Cope's The Furrbawl Poems...reviewed by JoSelle Vanderhooft

  
The Furrbawl Poems: Uncollected Poems 1973-1993
Steven R. Cope
Broadstone Books
ISBN Numbers:
Hardback, 0972114440
Paperback, 0972114432

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft



I have a gnome in tattered breeches
I feed with the hound.
He limps out of the forest

and up to the pan.
He laps up the gravy.
He thinks I don't see him.

He thinks all my faith
has been aborted by time,
that I would now, if permitted,

take him into my arms
and lead him through Emerson,
through mountains of Camus, rivers of Jung,

make him hand and head
of a world he deplores,
a professor, a critic, an egghead.

The above poem (reproduced in its entirety) is not only the titular piece of The Furrbawl Poems, Kentucky poet Steven R. Cope's third book of poetry, it is also the piece which best captures the spirit of the entire collection. Like the stubborn garden gnome, Furrbawl–Cope's favorite symbol for the poet–who stands between the conflicting worlds of nature and civilization, the pieces in this collection walk the line between savagery and tenderness, action and contemplation, academia and raw emotion. Whether writing about the rugged beauty of the Appalachians, the memory of a long-dead uncle or a curmudgeonly rant against local politicians, Cope's poetry is linguistically rich and rhythmically stunning–and not afraid, like its writer's home, to be a bit rough around the edges.

A specific sense of place has long been a central concern of American poets. After all, where would Robert Frost be without New England's forests or Terry Tempest Williams without the Utah desert? For Cope, the landscape is his native bluegrass country with its mist-swirled mountains, dense forests and unearthly stillness–a place where, as in the poem "To Hear the Snow," a person can become "some strange half-man, half-beast gone wild to hear the silence, the snow." Indeed, Cope largely devotes two of Furrbawl's five sections to poems "dealing with alienation from or immersion in the natural world" (as he says in the book's introduction). From the near-Dionysian "The Animal King" to the meditative beauty of poems like "After Appalache," "Adam," "Trog," and "Dead Birds," Cope effectively evokes the sublime in nature as effectively as a Thomas Cole landscape.

This poet, however, does not share Cole's Romantic sensibilities about the natural world. Far from being a place that sympathizes with the human condition, his Appalachia is often a landscape beautiful in its indifference to death, decay and human isolation–a quality most clearly seen in the collection's shorter poems, such as "The Best," "The Night Camp," "Fawnkill," and "A Death." In the last of these (again produced in its entirety), death is portrayed in such matter-of-fact terms as the intake of breath.

Sleep has come upon it
like the last thing heard:
a thought, a turning,
something in the eye
that is almost seen,
a creeping in the branches.
Then even that is gone.

Cope's ephemeral, musical style–which presents the reader with a variety of impressions rather than a linear thought line–is most effective in shorter poems such as this. "A Death" and others like it provide the reader with a clear subject and a solid treatment sometimes lacking in Cope's longer works, such as "Assessment Overheard from My Elm Tree Perch, Summer '92, Drama Under the Stars," " Hwevey Island," and "Cow Beach Stampede." Though these poems do not lack Cope's unique, gorgeous language, the reader is often left lost and wandering in the words, unable to fully follow the poet's train of thought.

Cope is just as effective in portraying the people of rural Kentucky as he is in evoking the land they call home. Interestingly, the best poems in Furbawl are often the oldest, written when Cope was still cutting his chops as a poet. These can be found in the book's last section and largely address the poet's childhood and various members of his family. Here we have a childhood sweetheart "Sweet Lana" and a nameless uncle killed in battle in "The Initialed Tree," arguably the book's best poem. There is also ribald Uncle Willie giving his "Half-Pint" nephew some sage advice and whom the adult Cope never visited because "I thought he also would endure/til I was rich or had the time." Cope skillfully captures the humanness, the idiom and essence of his subjects, with a sentimentality that never feels mawkish or unearned.

The only section of the book that falls short of expectations is the first, which houses poems written about or after writers such as John Donne, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Charles Bukowski, among others. Though these are competently written and provide the reader with a ready understanding of Cope's influences, the problem lies in their lack of accessibility. According to Cope, "[w]ithout them [these writers] the poems are null." For readers who can easily identify the subjects of these pieces, such as Bunhill Fields (William Blake's burial place), or the way in which "Four Ways of Recalling Wallace Stevens" plays off Stevens' seminal "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird." these poems may seem like a clever conversation with literary history–if not a particularly inspired one. For other readers, the section may be inaccessible enough to warrant putting down the book instead of picking up a dictionary of literary terms.

The Furrbawl Poems is not an easy or an even collection by any means. Many of its poems require multiple readings in order to be fully grasped. Some only seem to flow when read out loud (a lifelong composer, Cope took up poetry at age 29 and his writing has always contained a musical, almost bluegrass quality). Then again, a little ugliness makes gnomes all the more intriguing. Cope is a powerful and inventive poet whose raw hymns to nature and human peculiarity make The Furrbawl Poems worthy reading.
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