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Quartets and Questions Book review: the blue-collar sun, Lucas Farrell B Y B E N JA M I N AL ESHIRE • aleshire@sevendaysvt.com COURTESY OF LOUISA CONRAD
BOOKS
Lucas Farrell with Maisie
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ownshend farmer and author Lucas Farrell has won the inaugural Sundog Poetry Book Award for the blue-collar sun. Vermont poet laureate Mary Ruefle judged the competition. “His is a mind that never stops moving,” Ruefle noted in her moving citation. Hadestown creator Anaïs Mitchell put it another way in a blurb: “[These poems] are both warmly familiar and weird AF.” The blue-collar sun does feel raw, in the best sense of the word. Even the book’s typeface refuses expectations, with a font that mimics the irregular keystrokes of a well-worn typewriter. The poems concern everything from goats in labor to vanishing Icelandic glaciers to fables about selling bird hearts during the apocalypse. They come laced with startling, unpredictable turns of phrase that send the reader racing back to enjoy them again. 24
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The book is divided into four independent sections that vary greatly in style, and even in genre. The effect is akin to the abrupt change of Vermont’s seasons — or perhaps to listening to a quartet played one instrument at a time, the melody more discernible with each new voice. The first section, “this is your animal,” opens with a brief prose poem describing an ice storm; it immediately hooks the reader with irresistible wordplay and internal rhyme. “There is a music in the road that the dogs dog to, that the people people to. It’s a dance that I dance to. It’s silver,” Farrell writes, and then takes a wholly unexpected turn: “It goes: who is this place, why did it home here, where’s the beginning, now hurt me.” Farrell pulls off a magic trick here: The reader neither understands precisely what prompted this abrupt emotional shift nor
needs to. The moment simply leaves a haunting jolt in its wake as the poem tacks in other directions. “There is an honestto-god answer. I don’t know what it is or where to find it, but I’m sensual to it. After all, we’re not going to be here for very long,” the poem continues. “Stand arm in arm with the conditions and marvel.” “Orienteering,” another tightly compressed prose poem, begins by lulling the reader with language that could have been pulled from a hiking guide. Then it declares: “the local is only local in relation to the version of the field reflected in the window I look at from the precise center of my grief. I want you egregiously. Define geography: you went away. Go away.” Lovers of narrative clarity might wonder: Whose grief does this refer to? What’s happened, who’s separating here, and why? Farrell seems to be winking during these
elusive yet highly satisfying tonal shifts, as if reminding us: There are honest-to-god answers to these questions; I don’t know how to find them, but I’m sensual to it. Farrell’s first book, The Many Woods of Grief, won the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press. He and his wife, artist Louisa Conrad, met at Middlebury College and have advanced degrees in their fields, but they left academia to found Big Picture Farm. Together they manage a herd of 40 goats, the farmstead’s award-winning confectionery and a website that introduces each goat individually. Big Picture’s Instagram feed might look straight out of Vanity Fair (thanks to rock star-quality photography by Conrad), but Farrell’s poems don’t shy away from showing the unglamorous labor behind that artisanal chèvre. “Wildflowers,” for