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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE FORTY-FIVE: Apr-Jun (08) > Reviews >Ellaraine Lockie's Blue Ribbons at the County Fair...reviewed by JoSelle Vanderhooft



Blue Ribbons at the County Fair
Ellaraine Lockie
PWJ Publishing
ISBN Number: 0939221454

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft



Poet Ellaraine Lockie loves poetry contests and with good reason: She has placed first in a number of them, including the California State Poetry Society Monthly Contest, the Tricked by Thunder Contest, the Arizona Authors Association Poetry Contest and Utah´s own Writers at Work Contest. As the book's title indicates, many of her poems have also quite literally won blue ribbons at a number of county and state fairs.

So what's a poet to do with all these trophies and ribbons? Why not assemble all of her award-winning entries into a single book?

As a collection based upon award-winning poems, Blue Ribbons at the County Fair does not center on any one subject. The book's thirty-four poems range from discussions of the beauty of rural Montana to the difficulty of caring for an aging parent; from the pain of loveless marriage to the complex relationship between parents, grown children and pets. Whatever her subject, Lockie's skill with imagery and rhythm and her keen understanding of human nature make her newest collection strong, enjoyable and worthy of every coveted blue ribbon.

Lockie is often at her best when writing about Montana. As a native of the Big Sky Country, she has a natural eye and ear for her home state–for its mountain vistas, its prairie beauty, its windy silences and its arresting vastness. It is a beauty, as any Westerner knows, that can often be equally breathtaking in its starkness and cruelty. In "Godot Goes to Montana" Lockie captures the essence of farm life in this Rocky Mountain state–equal parts hardscrabble frustration, bone-breaking work and neighborly coziness. "Back in the Sixties" portrays an equally troubling side of Montana life–the vicious gossip and casual misogyny of life in small towns at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. "One for the Mountain Road" chronicles the lives speeders, drunk drivers, suicides and road rages obliterate on Montana highways–lives that ubiquitous white crosses often mark at the road's shoulders.

But like any Westerner, Lockie sometimes just chooses to revel in the beauty of her home of homes. In "How to Know a Prairie Poem" she tells the reader how to shut up, be still and savor her state's beauty.

You can hear it with windows down
on your Ford Explorer
Garth Brooks ejected at the first
meadowlark's five-note warble
Its meter already measured by Mother Nature
Accompanied by tires pounding their gravel crunch
governed by a thirty-mile-an-hour metronome
Cadence replaced with the beat of background
crickets
after you pull over for a picnic

You can taste it in slices
of homemade Montana-wheat bread
wrapped around chokecherry jelly
and chunky peanut butter
Washed down with lukewarm coffee from a thermos
and dark chocolate that melts in your mouth
Caffeine and feral funneling through your fingers
for a first draft in a journal you keep in the dash box
While a few feet away a family
of cottontail feed on purple clover

...

You can feel it down to your feet
the unforeseen drum roll of thunder
as though a distant herd of buffalo hooves
is thrumming nerve endings

Although one could spend an entire review of Blue Ribbons at the County Fair discussing the high quality of Lockie's Montana poems, such a review would do grave injustice to the rest of the poet's work. Lockie is not only a gifted poet of the American West, she is also talented when it comes to describing the inner lives of women, particularly the ways in which they often suffer under their socially-imposed roles as caregivers. Beginning with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot that reads "teach us to care/ teach us not to care," "Lost in Love" portrays the slow disintegration of a woman who "spreads herself thin" for her husband, her children, her aging mother, her demanding boss and her callous friends. Ultimately, Lockie shows that social obligations force women to care so much that no one is left to care for them at the end of their long and trying days.

She stares straight ahead
frozen nerves fragmented
on the cold floor
of indifference supporting her

One of the collection's most striking poems on this theme is "The Whipping Woman" which bluntly and painfully extends the metaphor of woman as nurturer and caregiver in a relationship where these two things are often the emotional core–the relationship between a daughter who must care for her aging mother. In this poem (here reproduced in full), the speaker discusses her inability (and perhaps her unwillingness) to become her mother's mother and the guilt she experiences for her perceived failure. Note the fluidity between the roles of "mother" and "daughter."

The woman I hire to daughter my mother
makes bi-weekly visits to the dementia ward
Lies down beside the near-still waters

Accepts the mouth kisses wet with drool
From where gravelly words
dribble down washed-out gullies

Like a whipping boy she bears the brunt
of each face-to-face flagellation
that my rawhide flesh refuses

And for twenty dollars an hour I purchase
like the contraposition of a professional mourner
Substitution for services I can´t supply

Lockie extends her theme of women suffering under traditional expectations in "Commonplace," which describes a heterosexual marriage blunted and cooled by familiarity and a triptych of poems about an affair that arises, presumably from the ashes of that marriage–"The Other Woman," "Silk Dreams" and "The Affair." In each of these poems, the speaker discusses her frustrations with her marriage, her disdain for her lover's wife and her ultimate disappointment when the relationship dissolves. She speaks without guilt and hesitancy and with an honest bluntness that women are all too often encouraged to repress.

Blue Ribbons at the County Fair is a fiercely beautiful and quietly angry collection rendered in language that is as rocky as the Montana landscape. It is highly recommended not only to those with an interest in contemporary women writers, but for readers who love the American West and are eager to read more from its talented, but often underrepresented, authors.
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