68
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Some writers love to make up almost everything, while others prefer to work with the landscapes and milieu made familiar by upbringing, home, and travel. Peter Makuck tends toward the latter. To introduce and consider the relations between two new books by Makuck, Mandatory Evacuation and Wins and Losses is to discover how rooted a narrator can be in his own times and places.
HOOKS LIKE QUESTION MARKS: NEW POETRY AND FICTION FROM PETER MAKUCK
The persona emerging from the poems of Mandatory Evacuations observes and is allied to the “hunched figure with his hook, / shaped like a question, poletossed” into the shiny blackness of the Tar River. The bright metal hook in that wet darkness asks an unknown question and waits for a tug on the line in response. The poet is attentive to place and to signs of the spirit and to the changing weather of his own life (including hurricanes that put a home at risk and lead to the mandatory evacuations of the title). Long past Romanticism, though loving the richness of “Renoir-time” and foreign color and image, the poet finds words and landscape to be uneasy partners. He often feels the inadequacy of language. Often, nothing can touch the powers and vividness of nature: “the sky / was blue / beyond the help / of any words.” After all, nature is a subject that also writes and speaks itself in “the repeated phrases of
a review by Marly Youmans Peter Makuck. Mandatory Evacuation. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions Limited, 2016. —. Wins and Losses. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016.
PETER MAKUCK grew up in New London, CT, receiving his BA from St. Francis College in Maine where he studied French and English. He received his PhD from Kent State University. He is a Harriot College Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences Emeritus, and, during his tenure at ECU, founded Tar River Poetry, which he edited until his retirement in 2006. The author of seven poetry collections, he was interviewed in NCLR 2007 and his poetry has appeared in both the 1995 and 1996 issues.
RIGHT Peter Makuck reading at
Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC, 19 Oct. 2016
PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVE MITCHELL
MARLY YOUMANS has written thirteen books, including Glimmerglass (Mercer University Press, 2014; reviewed in NCLR Online 2016. Her poetry collections include The Foliate Head (Stanza Press, 2012), The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press, 2011), and Thaliad (Phoenicia, 2012). Read an interview with Marly Youmans in NCLR 2004.
waves.” Although he speaks of the risk of “becom[ing] blind to the place / where you live,” he is an observer sensitive to the beauties of the natural world, particularly of the sea: “White barnacles speckled / a black back dashed with scars”; “dozens of shrimp flash in all directions / like a starburst”; shrimp reveal “a green moon on each tail blade”; a motel spotlight catches “gulls in its long beam / glittering like confetti.” Living in an era past Christendom, his hold on spirit is uncertain. Mystery has drained from his life, the foreign priest reduces in strangeness to become “just like me,” and the “granite church” of his childhood sinks into an unlovely black lake, not hellfire but asphalt. He gives the nod to mindfulness and presence, and is self-conscious and intellectual about spiritual practices: “Tell yourself you need / no more than you have.” Drawn to beauty, he observes wisteria “like light-blue lanterns left / by someone who knows we need them.” Where is this someone? From time to time, he is stirred by such questions: “My yes-no argument came alive again.” When posed as a man “waiting for a sign” in darkness, the only yes for him is the natural world’s yips and howls. Past childhood, he looks backward and forward, “trying not to” talk about himself and yet talking about himself in a world where the past is never dead and never even past. He repudiates the parish school of his childhood: “to let X equal all the