North Carolina Miscellany
four for the bookshelf, four for the future a review by Al Maginnes Peter Makuck. Long Lens: New and Selected Poems. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd, 2010. Heather Ross Miller. Lumina: A Town of Voices. Hammond, LA: Louisiana Literature Press, 2011. David Rigsbee. The Red Tower: New and Selected Poems. Montgomery, AL: New South Books, 2010. Eleanor Ross Taylor. Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.
Al Maginnes has been a resident of North Carolina for over thirty years. He teaches writing and literature at Wake Technical Community College. He received his BA from ECU, and his MFA from the University of Arkansas. He is the author of four full-length poetry collections. The fourth, Ghost Alphabet (2008), won the White Pine Poetry Prize. See an interview with and poetry by Maginnes in NCLR 2007.
Despite the recent mania for collections of poems centered on a single story or concept, books of poems are, by and large, artificial constructs. Generally speaking, poems are written one at a time, not as part of a larger scheme. So when it comes time to put together a collection, the poet often finds him or herself treading water, looking for poems that fit together and wondering what to do with that rare brilliant outlier that seems to fit nowhere in the slowly coalescing collection, which is, at this point, simply a mass of pages spread across a table or living room floor. If a poet is successful in putting together enough such hybrids, he or she might wind up in the position of putting together a volume of “selected poems,” along with a few new ones. These collections offer readers a fresh introduction to work published years before, even as such collections assure long-time readers of the poet that loyalty is justified. Such collections also offer a rare opportunity to see how a poet’s work of years and decades fits together. Of the four collections under consideration here, three are new and selected volumes, while the fourth is a collection of the kind I mentioned in the first paragraph, a collection centered around a small town and its inhabitants. The poets reviewed here are either North Carolina natives or long-time residents, and three of them still reside here. The four writers reviewed here also have behind them long careers of writing and, in the cases of all but Eleanor Ross Taylor, distinguished careers as teachers of writing and literature, as well. I feel I should disclose that two of these poets I’m writing about here, Peter Makuck and Heather Ross Miller, were professors of mine, Makuck
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at East Carolina University and Miller at the University of Arkansas. And David Rigsbee is a fellow Raleigh resident and a friend, but in the comradeship of North Carolina’s writing community, it would be strange if a writer-reviewer did not know fellow writers. David Rigsbee is a native of Durham, NC, who, after living many other places, now resides in Raleigh where he is professor of English at Mount Olive College. The Red Tower, his volume of new and selected poems, culls poems going back to his first book of poems, Stamping Ground, which was published in 1976. Because The Red Tower is divided into two sections only, a short section of new poems and a much longer one simply called “Selected Poems,” it is impossible for the new reader of Rigsbee’s work to know the chronological order of the poems. So one is left to conclude that the strengths of this poet’s work – a world view steeped in art and philosophy, a knack for graceful lines, accessible language that never oversimplifies the conditions it describes – have been with him from the beginning. “Wanted: a sky-blue life,” Rigsbee writes in “The Stone House,” an elegy for the literary critic Edmund Wilson. A few lines later he adds, “Wanted too, a meaning for these footsteps,” and these two lines might sum up what seem to be the two impulses of Rigsbee’s poetry. Throughout The Red Tower, there is both the desire for beauty as well as the need to attach some meaning to it. The fact that this poem is also an elegy for a writer of an earlier generation is indicative as well; Rigsbee’s work is often elegiac. There are several poems here for a younger brother who committed