134
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
THE POWER OF PLACE a review by Peter Makuck J. Scott Brownlee. Requiem for Used Ignition Cap. Asheville, NC: Orison Books, 2015. Mary Kratt. Watch Where You Walk: New & Selected Poems. Davidson, NC: Lorimer Pess, 2015.
PETER MAKUCK grew up in New London, CT. He received his BA from St. Frances College in Maine, where he studied French and English. After teaching French for two years, he earned a PhD in American literature from Kent State University. He has been a Fulbright Exchange Professor at Université de Savoie in Chambéry, France, and a Visiting Writer at Brigham Young University. He is an East Carolina University Harriot College Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences Emeritus. During his tenure at ECU, he founded Tar River Poetry, which he edited until his retirement in 2006. He is the author of eight poetry collections and four short story collections (the latest ones of each are reviewed in this issue). Read more about him in his 2007 NCLR interview and on his website. J. SCOTT BROWNLEE was born in Texas and received his BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin, an MLS from UNC Chapel Hill, and his MFA from New York University. Currently, Brownlee lives in Philadelphia and teaches poetry workshops. He received the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize for Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, and his work has been published in many journals, including Tar River Poetry, South Dakota Review, and Greensboro Review. MARY KRATT, a native of West Virginia, has lived most of her life in Charlotte, NC. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She is a winner of the Brockman-Campbell Poetry Book Award, the Oscar Arnold Young Poetry Book Award, the Peace History Book Prize, St. Andrews Writer in Community Award, and the Irene Blair Honeycutt Legacy Award. Her nonfiction books feature the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. She taught English and American Studies at UNC Charlotte and currently lives in Charlotte with her husband, Jim.
The poets under consideration here share some common ground. Both use narrative to write about death, parents, religion, the haves and the have-nots, and especially place. Mary Kratt writes about a West Virginia coal town, North Carolina mountains, waters of the Chesapeake, and a few of the countries she has visited. J. Scott Brownlee focuses exclusively on Llano, TX, the small town where he grew up. I think both poets would agree that place educates us, shapes our thoughts and emotions, provides us with a lens to see and evaluate the world. There’s a saying, Tell me where you’re from, and I’ll tell you who you are. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but to some extent place does give us an identity, or tells us what not to identify with. The second poem in J. Scott Brownlee’s first fulllength volume, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, is “Plunge,” a requiem for a drowned boy, written in the imperative mood. The speaker tells himself and the reader what not to identify with or believe: Empty the casket of the other boy who drowned and his mother’s Bible where she wrote her son’s name in the margins a thousand times. Empty the parable where Jesus walks on water in a storm and revise it. Write: Jesus drowns. Everyone does. Empty the disappearing town I’m both a part of and depart from with its George Bush and its Baptists and its single-mindedness. “There is only one way,” its preachers say, “and our President knows.”
Brownlee writes vividly about his hometown and deeply etches certain moments in a reader’s memory. Llano is a place where men and boys love guns, hunt for deer, fish for catfish, swim, get drunk, go to Baptist revivals, shoot pool, play football, score drugs, and where “poor Tejanos / jump in old Ford trucks, waiting to melt // thick pools of asphalt for new roads.” Guns play a major role in the male culture here, and in the first poem, “Llano River, Sunset,” Brownlee introduces the volume’s pervasive theme of death: I’ve heard the river is a portal to the next world: looking in it you enter the body you’ll be after skin’s departure. JonMichael slid the gun off safety,