Three Chapbooks

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


Hard Blessings
Patrick Carrington
Main Street Rag
ISBN Number: 9781599481159

          The first chapbook in this review takes the reader to the orchards, fields, kitchens and run-down factory towns of rural New England. This landscape of rust and chilly autumnal beauty is the canvas upon which Patrick Carrington depicts the everyday struggles of men and women and the hard-won graces that come from such trials. He does so in language as striking as a cold snap and imagery as sharp and precise as the points of icicles.

          Some of the “hard blessings” of which the poet speaks were taught to him by loved ones—an eccentric aunt who taught him “how to be fine with [himself] in the moment” (“Crazy Mabel”), a beloved grandmother whose passing taught him his first lesson about death’s inexplicability (“Learning of the Promised Land”).

          Like Tennessee Williams before him, the monosyllable of Carrington’s clock is “loss, loss, loss.” But unlike Williams, Carrington devotes his heart not to its opposition but to acceptance of this fact. He beautifully explains the “hard blessing” of doing so in “Flux” (here reproduced in full). In this poem, the speaker thinks of a lost loved one, for whom he has stopped grieving for the first time in a long while.

Today your absence passed unnoticed.
I suppose that means I am learning to go on
without you. As I walked by,
I did not stare at your house like a mourner
who rereads the same stone every Sunday
as if the name might have changed.
I did not coil inward, expecting that great hand
to reach out your window and remind me
of my grief with a smack,
concentrating instead on how deeply
I once adored a summer day like this one,
adoration being a concept recently rediscovered.
When I realized I had not thought of you
for twenty-four hours, I felt indecent,
as if I had sworn into God’s clean ear.
I am in some no man’s land now,
waiting to be shown my place
in the order of things. Much like you
at that moment you sighed and stilled.
In a limbo between two worlds,
no longer part of one, not yet part of the other.

          This most difficult of lessons—to come to terms with death and being in the limbo we call grief—is referenced in several of the poems in Hard Blessings, including those which focus on the landscape. For Carrington, nature itself often mirrors this most difficult of blessings. In “Jonagolds,” for example, he compares the overtaking of an apple tree by worms and disease to the decline and demise of a family member in whose orchard the proud tree stood, and whose apples rotted when s/he became too ill to pluck them.

          There is a hard blessing to be found even in the decay of once-proud towns and the seemingly endless and inexplicable suffering of their inhabitants. Although it is often not as obvious, perhaps, as learning to come to terms with one’s own mortality, it is a blessing nonetheless, and often one that is difficult to notice, as the speaker in “A Town Without Hearts” could well attest. After the factory closed, the unnamed speaker notes that the town “turned blue,” and aged even after it had died.

Boys have given up on baseball.
The tailor hangs his own pinstriped pants
in the window. He has nothing left
to sew. I pull seams
in my bathroom to keep him busy.

          Although the movie house is “boarded,” the Italian restaurant deserted and the streets desolate, the speaker, unlike the alley cats, does not think “in terms of goodbye,” even though s/he longs to see young lovers carving their initials in oaks or children erecting tree houses. Rather, s/he remains and does the only thing s/he can think to do: survive.

There’s nothing to do today
except tug on my sleeve
just enough to look like an accident.

          This persistence—“I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” as Samuel Beckett described it in his novel, The Unnamable— is perhaps the hardest blessing of them all.

          Carrington’s journey through rural fields and small-town back-streets is powerful, but all too brief; and the reader who appreciates poetry that stubbornly clings to hope even in the face of despair will find himself or herself wanting more.


My Father’s Speech
Katherine Cottle
Apprentice House
ISBN Number: 9781934074305

          In many ways, Katherine Cottle’s debut chapbook (and winner of the Apprentice House Chapbook Competition) is as much an artifact of West Virginia’s “coal country” as it is poetry. The photograph of the coal scrip on the cover is the first indicator. As Cottle writes in the introduction, this scrip (which belonged to her grandfather, Robert) served as money in the coal mines of the area in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. As she explains it, the companies issued the scrip as an “advance against wages” to their workers, who could only use it to purchase necessities at the company store or to pay for such things as rent in company-owned apartments.

          “Scrip is now a thing of the past,” writes Cottle. “The company towns and the company stores are fading fast. Most are gone. The scrip remains to tell the story.”

          Indeed, the scrip remains, and so does Cottle’s chapbook. In its 43 pages, Cottle tells the stories of miners and others who live and continue to remain in these oft-ignored parts of her state. Largely, her poems are photographic snapshots of people and places formed from words instead of film and developing chemicals; some of them are even based quite literally on historical photographs.

          In the book’s first three poems, Cottle sets the scene for her readers by showing us her father, a coal miner whose West Virginia accent the author praises in the book’s title poem.

If I could pull it from your mouth
It would be black as coal dust,
The tiny grains of rock that climbed
Through the miners’ lungs,
Leaving your father’s chest a wilt
Of ragged breath.

…

But you keep the edge hidden well,
Tucked behind a white button down and tie,
Your body aging as quickly as a young boy’s.

          In “Coal Camp Cranberry Mine West Virginia, 1950” and “Day Force Cranberry Mine West Virginia, 1956,” Cottle meditates upon two family photographs—one of her grandmother and one of her father, respectively, and the rugged, inhospitable conditions in which they lived just fifty years ago. In “Coal Camp,” Cottle describes the strength her grandmother showed while raising children in a company town. In “Day Force,” she writes of the men photographed with her father who will die in the tunnels.

All of the men’s eyes are open, even
Yours. Perhaps it is the flash, the pinching yellow so much like the sun,
     that holds them there. Perhaps, like the carbide glow
From your helmet, the light meant safety, someone to watch
Your back, that you were not the only one down there.

          Cottle next presents a series of poems written after photographer Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachian Portraits of the 1980s and early 90s. In these, she describes the butchering of hogs, farmers standing near a water pump, a boy member of a so-called “snake handler” Christian sect holding a box with a serpent and a jar of poison and, of course, a retired coal miner. In each of these photographs, Cottle displays not only a keen eye for detail, but also a sympathy for her subjects and a willingness to imagine their lives. Take, for example, “Bert Holding Homemade Jew’s Harp Knott Country, Kentucky, 1987” (here reproduced in full):

The way he is holding
the homemade Jew’s harp,
carefully crafted from a rusty bed spring
and a Prince Albert tobacco can,
makes everything else
in the picture insignificant:
his filthy button down shirt,
uneven pants, wrinkled chin,
his crooked body leaning
between an old tire and a rusting stove.
The trees even back away
from the instrument,
cradled in his hands like a newborn,
and the music that only he can hear
since his sunstroke thirty years ago:

the swipe of his grandmother’s hand
across his four year old forehead,
the sound of the river
on the top of Sloan mountain,
the voice that tells him
to walk twenty miles every day,
only stopping
when his body gives out,
when all he can hear is the breath
of God just behind his dirty ears.

          But My Father’s Speech is not just a record of the land Cottle’s ancestors called home. In several of these poems, Cottle also defines her own history in West Virginia, and the ways in which the land shaped her as surely as the soot of the mines tattooed her father’s skin with black veins. In “Digging to China,” the chapbook’s final poem, Cottle claims her history for herself by describing her childhood dreams of digging straight through the earth to the magical land beyond. The poem moves from her childhood to the present day, in which Cottle sits outside, attempting to describe her past.

Above, on a telephone line,
A robin readies for flight.
While I scratch out and re-write,
Hunting for preciseness,
She lifts,
Not calculating the distance
Or the exact measurement of her journey,
Only the ability of the wind
To keep her up,

…

Underneath, the world sighs,
Opens a small pore,
And for a moment I fit through,
Just barely.

          Christine Stewart, a judge for the Apprentice House chapbook contest and the director of the “Write Here, Write Now” workshops, said that My Father’s Speech took her “into a world I knew nothing about, but found fascinating.” Indeed. For this reason alone, Cottle’s book is indispensable to the percentage of American readers who know little or nothing about the people and history of the Appalachians. Cottle’s keen eye for detail and the sweeping vision of history she presents make the journey through her chapbook even more resonant.


Mom’s Canoe
Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press
ISBN-13 Number: 9781933896274
ISBN-10 Number: 1933896272

          Like My Father’s Speech above, Rebecca Foust’s award-winning chapbook, Mom’s Canoe, is concerned largely with the rural landscape and the poet’s family’s place in that landscape and its history. Indeed, one of the book’s later poems, “Altoona to Anywhere,” seems to echo the sentiments of the titular poem in Cottle’s book: that one can never erase one’s history.

Go ahead, aspire to transcend
Your hardscrabble roots, bootstrap
The life you dream on,
Escape the small-minded tyranny
Of your small-minded Midwestern
Coalmining town.

But when you’ve left it behind you
May find it still there, in your dreams,
Your syntax, the smell of your hair,
Its real smell, under the shampoo.
Beware DNA; it will out or be outed
And you’ll find yourself back
Where you started…

          The Midwest is in Foust’s DNA, and the long shadows of this large and varied region infuse all of the poems in her deceptively slim chapbook, whether they discuss the people of Altoona, Iowa (including members of Foust’s family) or the beautiful, often mysterious landscape. Mom’s Canoe is a celebration of this region as well as a history of Foust’s family and the region in which they dwell.

          In many ways, Foust works like an archaeologist to excavate her region and her place within it. She does so somewhat literally in “Fossil Record,” in which she moves from discussing trilobites and ammonites resting in layers of prehistoric soil to the fetus waiting inside a womb and the bones inside a woman beneath an x-ray. In “Archeological Record” (here reproduced in full), she considers another cross-section: one replete with imagery of the Midwest as well as classical mythology. Like any good archaeologist, Foust then attempts to weave these elements into a story—an impressionistic one to be sure, but a story nonetheless that speaks of loss and hidden grief.

Scotch straight-up, thy neighbor’s
wife and Sunday Church
—Nobody’s talking

but one white glove is lost.
What was said, and not. Gaps
outline the years laid down

in stone, but each wedged-in bit
is rocking. Dreams, cookbook
notes, the dress a mother wore

to a father’s wake, or would
have worn—had she gone?
The shards meet to make

a pot you haven’t seen before.
The walls are half-effaced,
but Zeus is raping some girl

somewhere, you know that
much. It’s all here—battle,
faun, flash of dawn, grapes

twined into leafy crowns,
each loved thing lost, sieved
with bitter salt and ash.

          Foust is not always so indirect in her “digging” into Midwestern life, however. In poems such as “The Dream,” “Books for the Blind,” “Kinship of Family” and, of course, the collection’s titular piece she writes about her family’s place in this land—her mother’s tears (of joy and apprehension) upon discovering a pregnancy; her grandmother’s blindness; her parents’ deaths; the distance between two sisters who were once very close. These are poems, at times, of “bitter salt and ash,” as is the case with “Backwoods,” in which Foust describes her mother’s return to an abusive second husband.

“How could you,” she asks

After he blackened
your eye,
dumb-bitched you
and wrecked your canoe?

You escaped from that place once,
his cottage collapsed
on the banks of that dirty, dredged ditch
he calls a river; all you needed was a car
where you could sleep, keep your things.

          But of course, no region is all bitterness and bleakness, even the most hardscrabble one. In other poems, such as “Mom’s Canoe,” family and landscape meld together elegiacly, and even a memory of a mother’s death is transformed into something as beautiful and breathtaking as it is sad.

I still see you rising from water to sky,
paddle held high,
river drops limning its edge.
Brown diamonds catch the light as you lift, then dip.
Parting the current, you slip
silently through the evening shadows.
You, birdsong, watersong, slanting light,
following river bend, swallowed from sight.

          Foust’s language and imagery, as the reader has probably by now divined, are as challenging as they are startling, and the reader who wants to follow her through her narratives would be well advised to consider and reconsider each poem, each phrase as an archaeologist reconsiders sand, bone and fragment. But patience is well-rewarded. Mom’s Canoe is a subtle and sometimes painful evocation of the Midwest, an example of a regional voice that transcends its boundaries, achieving universal apppeal.