164
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
TO SPEAK IN YOUR OWN VOICE a review by Janice N. Harrington Dorianne Laux. Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019. Annie Woodford. Bootleg. Groundhog Poetry Press, LLC, 2019.
JANICE N. HARRINGTON, born and raised in Alabama, teaches poetry writing at the University of Illinois. A poet and children’s writer, her latest poetry book is Primitive: The Life and Art of Horace H. Pippin (BOA Editions, 2016).
Imagine two poets on a back porch, in easy conversation, swapping poems like recipes, Dorianne Laux’s conveying adult sorrow over her mother’s death and Annie Woodford’s expressing a childhood yearning for a working mother taken by a nightshift. Woodford shaping her first words from a book on her Aunt Alice’s shelf, You Can Speak with Your Dead, while Laux reads “Dark signs / that crawled toward the edge of the page” under her sheets at night with the aid of a flashlight. When Woodford points to the 1920s–30s bluegrass of Charlie Poole, Laux counters with Mick Jagger. Laux has assembled a retrospective of her career, while Woodford launches her debut collection. They have much in common even though they have followed different muses. Laux writes in “Mine Own Phil Levine” that Levine taught her “to hold true / To my vision, to speak in my own voice / To say the thing straight out,” while Woodford’s “Flying Kites with Elizabeth Bishop” suggests what she has learned from the great descriptive poet: “When memory aches, she can stroke feathered flanks / and begin again to write.” Memory is not an act of sweet nostalgia. Memory aches – it is alive, it has a body – but each poet approaches the ache differently. Like Levine, Laux tackles memory straight on. Like Bishop,
Woodford approaches memory with a taut restraint. Memory, storytelling, and empathy infuse Dorianne Laux’s must-read volume, Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems. Each section of the book has an underlying urgency that drives readers into Laux’s life and perceptions. Throughout, Laux writes about difficult experiences in a straightforward, conversational tone laced with subtle musicality. The opening poem, “Two Pictures of My Sister,” returns again and again to the pronoun “she,” a return that begins to feel like the blows of a belt: “She dares him. / Go on. Hit me again.” Laux resolves the poem, which describes her father beating her sister, in a back-and-forth play of simile and metaphor. Her sister’s welt is like a flower in a nature film. Her eyelid is a violet petal. Her eyes are like the eyes in a painting. And the memory of her face is the moon that follows you everywhere. After such lines, who can’t imagine the sister’s face or how it haunts? In the fifth section, “The Book of Men,” Laux acknowledges her poetic debt in “Mine Own Phil Levine”: “The greatest thing, he said, was presence / To be yourself in your own time, to stand up.” Laux learned his lessons well. She maintains a firstperson perspective, even when revealing the abuse she suffered