Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
FRICTION AS A POINT OF DEPARTURE a review by Joshua Clegg Caffery Joseph Mills. This Miraculous Turning. Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2014. Dannye Romine Powell. Nobody Calls Me Darling Anymore. Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2015.
JOSHUA CLEGG CAFFERY of Franklin, LA, has a PhD from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and is the author of two books published by Louisiana State University Press, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana (2013) and In the Creole Twilight: Poems and Songs from Louisiana Folklore (2015). He is a founding member of the Red Stick Ramblers and a longtime member of the Louisiana French band Feufollet, which received a Grammy nomination for their album En Couleurs. He served as the 2013–2014 Alan Lomax Fellow in Folklife Studies at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, and has taught as a visiting professor in folklore at Indiana University in Bloomington. He currently lives with his wife and two children in Lafayette, LA.
Recently released by WinstonSalem’s Press 53, these two books by two very different poets cover a good deal of similar terrain. Both books deal with, to varying degrees, the anxieties and glories of parenthood and the schism between present and past selves, and both move, in their third and last sections, toward moments of epiphany, redemption, and acceptance. This Miraculous Turning, by Joseph Mills, finds, in its first section, a speaker fraught with guilt, paranoia, philosophical inspiration, and joy, all captured in well rendered anecdotes and tightly aligned ruminations related to child-rearing. Many of these anecdotes and ruminations result from a particular familial situation: the speaker has adopted two African American children, and he has raised them in the South (or is raising them there, depending on the poem’s timeframe). These circumstances set the stage for poignant vignettes that weave in and out of the poems, particularly in the beginning of the book. Mills achieves an odd sort of tension with the way he juxtaposes poems about complex and charged issues surrounding racial identity with poems that focus more on the universal emotions, fascinations, and misgivings of parenthood: the fear of not savoring the precious childhood moment, the fascination with a child’s sometimes enlightened perspectives, the wonderment about the bizarre things that children say and do. This fluctuation between the exigencies of a particularly fraught specific concern related to race and more general
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and familiar joys and anxieties delineates an interesting struggle in the mind of the speaker: can and will he set aside trepidation about the future in order to relish the precious pageant of childhood, or will he engage more directly with these worries, meeting them head-on as they arise. Many of the poems take this friction as a point of departure. In “Wash,” for instance, the speaker outlines an uncomfortable exchange (one of many in the book) with a man in his neighborhood who imagines (at least in the speaker’s mind) that the children have been adopted from “Haiti or Africa.” Another poem is set at a skating ring, with anxious parents watching their children teeter and totter and “strobe past them / faster and faster / just beyond their reach” – a really lovely conceit for every parent’s mixed desire to hold on and let go, to send them out but always hope that they loop back safely. “Wash” is followed by a beautiful poem in which a father figure guides his skating daughter to the safety of the middle of the ring. Once stabilized, secure, and confident, “she moves away / without a glance, then, after a moment, / she pushes herself back out onto the rink.” From this tender fable, which could be any father skating with any daughter, we move to another poem, “The Color Wheel,” in which the speaker again addresses race directly. His daughter is learning her colors. As she discovers the infinite variety of colors and colors within colors, she also realizes the narrow range of colors marked off for the description of racial identity,