Howling on Red Dirt Roads
Sara Claytor
Main Street Rag Publishing Company
ISBN Number: 978-1-59948-148-7

Reviewer: Alice Osborn


          In Howling on Red Dirt Roads, poet Sara Claytor takes her readers on a Hermes-like journey from the land of the living to hell and back. It’s an odyssey on red-dirt country roads crowded with bone and fire images, vivid colors and long-ago memories, some tender and some still raw. Race relations, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, sex, snakes and The Bible are all explored either through tight, imagistic poetry or mini-prose narratives that sing with humor, sincerity and sass. Claytor could be called a “Southern” poet as she adeptly channels the places and people of Warren County, North Carolina, but she's more original than that. She ponders cannibalism in “The Last Taboo,” a murder that takes place in her former apartment in “New York in the Those Days,” and witches in “Salem Pyres,” a stark poem that mirrors its subject matter:

better to be guilty, to be burned utterly
to enter heaven complete
leaving no shred of white bone scorched
no heart smoldering black
ashes to ashes sifted by the wind

yet something would be left
a toe, a finger
the tip of an ear
extremities from the extreme;
everything is imperfect
nothing burns evenly

          Claytor uses her memories from childhood to create her “Miss Lottie Jenkins” and her “Miss Ginny May” linked poems—these are tales of eccentric small-town women, one the Sunday School teacher and the other the town lesbian—who carved out their own lives amidst piety and sin, faith and deception. A natural storyteller, Claytor has the gift to inhabit other lives and relate human drama in forty lines or less.

          In “Flesh from Bone,” we learn there might be a reason why Lottie’s favorite Bible story is Jezebel. From the opening stanza, you know the poem will shift into darker territory:

Miss Lottie Jenkins
lived alone with four cats,
taught Sunday school 39 years to 8-year-olds,
Her fervent Bible tale, Jezebel, wicked queen, thrown
from her balcony for wild street dogs to rip flesh from bone.
Blue eyes glazed when she described screams and growls,
Jezebel’s tiny white hand left intact.

***

Few happenings in a small town, occasional Saturday night brawl.
Murder seldom graces the scene. Only secrets of the past
or family gossip rattle a placid surface. Miss Lottie’s father
died at the kitchen table, slumped in his underwear,
face buried in a bowl of potato soup. Some said heart attack;
others said he drowned. His left hand was missing.

***

When he died, Richmond cousins found her daddy’s clothes
still hanging in an upstairs bedroom, the pants’ leg slashed.
Perhaps Miss Lottie’s soul dried up, too, grass into pale straw?
We mused & mulled, finally decided Jezebel’s evil a minor sin.
Who ever knows what’s being weighed on the scales of the night?

          Another place Claytor shines is in her “Julia” poems, redolent with Clorox and starch. The titular red-dirt roads and bone images emerge in all eight poems to symbolize the enduring love between Claytor and her “black mother,” Julia.  In “Julia’s Invisible Fences,” Claytor writes, “You didn’t know pain from your belly from me or a stretching/of the thighs; no one told me about invisible fences/separating mother loves.” Readers feel the weight of Julia’s racial discrimination, but also see how her love for young Sara transcends any racial barriers. In each of the Julia poems, Claytor focuses on her subject from the author’s point of view. I found myself wondering what kind of poem might have emerged had Claytor written a few poems spoken in Julia’s voice.

          Laced with clever lines and carefully placed images, “Memory Bones” is about the strains of motherhood, bones symbolizing death and rebirth.

My rivers flow to the moon;
my memories a weight of granite.
If my soul were made of bones, I would hear it crack.

You always touted the negatives of me.
I was blue; born dead.
Country doctor brought me back from death to future death.

***

Did you never please your mother with the frowning face,
your soul insulated with fiberglass?
Were you born on a day God slept late?

          Claytor often steps out of her mini-narratives into image- and list-dense poems that create a certain distance between the speaker and the reader. These darker poems celebrate our human frailties and limitations, yet they also invite a simple acknowledgment that not everything is within our control. In “Contained,” Claytor ponders the concrete and theoretical world of boxes.

Boxes define life’s parameters
Box of cigars at birth; box of candy for love;
box of memorabilia for old age; box of ashes
for death—chose a casket or an urn.

***

We crowd into small-minded boxes,
elbows banging walls, fingernails scraping,
breaking on the edges. We are lonely in boxes,
Our cells, our punishments, our purgatory.
No matter what red dirt road we travel:
We are boxed in or boxed out.

          “Last Supper in the Yellow Kitchen” is another imagistic poem that could be about any non-communicative family, or it could be Claytor’s memory brought to life.

they sat
in the yellow kitchen

nibbling store-bought biscuits
dry paste sticking between their teeth
thickening their tongues
into mumbles over coconut cream pie
no words spoken of past blood spilled,
in the grass and snow, ripped hearts

they sat
in the yellow kitchen

faces like a wedding cake
left out in the rain
waiting for the Roman centurion
to pierce their sides
waiting for a staggering flash of light
waiting for the ending credits
as the screen darkens, stage curtain closes
EXIT signs blink red

          Like Dorothy or Alice, Claytor eventually returns home to her red-dirt roads, saying, “The world is paper    stains     ghosts    red dirt roads.” Maybe we won’t learn all of life’s secrets on this journey, but listening, questioning and slowing down imbue us with the wisdom that Claytor so generously shares. The images, details, and music of Howling on Red Dirt Roads linger long after reading, evidence of a poet comfortable with her craft and herself.