Divergent
works from a pair of Oberlin poets
by
Jean Dubail
The Plain Dealer
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Two
poets, both teachers at Oberlin College. Two books, one recounting
mob violence and lynchings in Cairo, Ill., nearly a century ago;
the other, an old man's meditations on many subjects, from nature
to death and loss. Two styles, the first a river of fragments and
phrases that move the story along without filling in all the details;
the second a group of compact poems in various forms, including
free adaptations of ancient Chinese poets. And two different results,
the first a partial success, the second a more complete one. "Blue
Front" (Graywolf Press, 84 pp., $14) is the lynching story. The
title refers to the restaurant where the author's father, then 5,
witnessed -- possibly -- some of the mob violence that followed
the rape and murder of a white woman. The violence built to the
lynching of a black man, then of a white man who happened to get
in the mob's way and finally to such widespread civil unrest that
the governor sent in 1,500 National Guardsmen to restore order.
Martha Collins tells this story in arresting fashion, with long,
lightly punctuated passages of sketchy narration, relieved occasionally
by blocks of text from contemporary postcards and newspaper articles
and brief snippets of Shakespeare. She does not shrink from the
horror: when they rushed to the scene of the first crime where a
woman lit the fire a Chicago paper said while the crowd danced and
shrieked (a Cairo paper said quiet and earnest) and while the body
was burning they cut off the half-burnt head and cut open the chest
cut out the heart for souvenirs someone cut off a foot a great prize
and later some bits of bone and placed the half-burnt head in a
park on a hitching post / a tire stick / a pole
But
vivid as this is, the effect is lessened by Collins' puzzling decision
to insert her father into the story. It is not clear whether he
witnessed anything more than general tumult, and at several critical
points she notes that he could not possibly have been present. One
wonders what the point was in mentioning him at all.
Of
a different order altogether are the intimate poems of David Young,
collected into "Black Lab," (Knopf, 68 pp., $23.) These pieces celebrate
nature, the attempt to age gracefully and mourn his father and (I
assume) his wife.
Young
dabbles in such unusual forms as the villanelle, a tightly structured
poem of five stanzas, and the cento, a sort of poetic clip job.
And he turns wordplay about the reversed terms "dog" and "God" into
an alternately serious and lighthearted meditation on the familiarity
of the one and the unapproachable nature of the other. The dog has
the best of it:
.
. . I study
the
rippling anthracite that steadies me,
the
tar, the glossy licorice, the sable;
and
in this snowfall that I should detest,
late
March and early April, I'm still rapt
to
see his coat so constellated, starred, re-starred
making
a comic cosmos I can love.
And
I love this metaphor, from "Faux Pas:"
The
fox paused at the field's edge, paw raised,
Looked
back and switched her tail, the way
A
thrush will flutter among maple leaves --
that's
when I thought of you, choosing
your
words, taking your careful steps,
sleeping
so restlessly.
In
this book, Young's 10th, he's clearly at the top of his game.
Dubail
is city editor of The Plain Dealer.
To reach
Jean Dubail:
books@plaind.com
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