Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
Dark and Light – and Wonderment a review by Susan Laughter Meyers Ron Rash, Waking. Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Press, 2011.
Susan Laughter Meyers’s poetry collection Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006) won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, the SIBA Book Award for Poetry, and the BrockmanCampbell Book Award. She is past president of the poetry societies of North Carolina and South Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in NCLR 2002, 2007, and 2008 and is forthcoming in 2012.
Ron Rash’s Waking, his fourth book of poems, continues the powerfully evocative course that he set his compass to in his previous three poetry collections: verse that calls up the lives and resolve of hard-working, God-fearing people in the mountains and foothills of the Carolinas. Mostly farmers, mostly poor or close to it, mostly dealing with hardships and bad choices – or bad luck – sometimes leading to catastrophe. Among the characters in his poems are historical figures, often from the Civil War, as well as his own kin. Rash began this poetic journey with Eureka Mill (Bench, 1998) that tells of the life of farmers who moved from Buncombe County, NC, to work in the mill at Chester, SC – and what it was like to trade one lifestyle of struggle for another. In his second poetry book, Among the Believers (Iris, 2000), he brings to light a largely past culture from the North Carolina mountains – snakehandling church services, hunting rituals, last rites. Raising the Dead (Iris, 2002) considers places and persons no longer visible in this world – including the pastures, creeks, and homesteads flooded by the dam completed in 1973 to form South Carolina’s Lake Jocassee. Waking, about rural life in the familiar setting of the North Carolina mountains, is a welcome addition to this bounty of poems. With a unity rarely found so constant in a poet’s body of work, Rash has produced a river of poetry, with the move from one book to the next a steady flow in the current. Dip into any of his poetry collections, read a poem or two from several of them, and you’ll find that the poems all fit together seamlessly. Part of the seamlessness of Rash’s poetry comes from a spare style – spare but rich in metaphor – that does not tolerate
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an extraneous word. A typical Ron Rash poem is based on a sevensyllable line, a characteristic element that leans toward spareness and that has remained constant in his poetry through the years. Poem after poem in Waking follows this lineation, often used in Welsh poetry. Much sound play is another characteristic. Common knowledge to anyone who has taken Rash’s poetry classes or workshops (as I have) is that he highly values sound in poetry. He is well versed in Welsh forms, poems exhibiting cynghanedd, with careful attention to the arrangement of sounds, making particularly effective use of alliteration and rhyme. Combine his skill of achieving highly lyrical sounds with his ability to tell a good story, and the result is the distinctive, tightly knit, well-crafted narrative poem so recognizable in his body of poetry thus far. He is best recognized these days for his novels, but a boon it is for the poetry world that he has not forsaken his talents as a poet. Thematically, Waking covers territories similar to those of Rash’s previous books: death, tragedy, the past, rural life, the natural world, and love. A symmetrically structured book divided into five sections of eleven or twelve poems each, it begins and ends with childhood, growth, and wonderment – which is to say, it begins and ends with the notion of “waking.” The child in the poems wakes to the world through all five of his senses. Much in the first section, for example, has to do with seeing – and, frequently, not seeing. In “First Memory,” the section’s opening poem, “Something unseen stirs in the reeds.” In “Sleepwalking,” the speaker is oblivious to the world until he steps outside to see “stars thrown / skyward like fistfuls of jacks.”