North Carolina Miscellany
some of Taylor’s poems become more fragmentary. Many of the poems in Late Leisure (Louisiana State UP, 1999) deal not only with the illness and death of her husband but with the simple fact of time passing. “Long-Dreaded Event Takes Place” begins, “it blurs / happening as on canvas / distanced / almost out of earshot.” Another poem, “Find Me,” uses the title as a first line and continues “by my trail of fragments.” But whatever there is of grief and despair in these poems gives way to the determination to survive. The title poem of Late Leisure describes a “past my expiration date” speaker sewing embroidery and concludes, “If I get to the last rows / of this kit, I’ll have to find / another one as slow and interim; / but no need [to] plan that yet.” Eleanor Ross Taylor is the perfect antidote for readers who despair of poets who seemingly write only for prizes and tenure. Over the years of a busy and at times difficult life, she crafted a body of work that stands apart from the trends of the times in which it was written. Captive Voices is a book that will be read long after the various schools and schisms that characterize so much recent poetry have fallen by the wayside. The four poets reviewed here have enjoyed long careers, in part because each of them has ignored to a large extent the faddishness that often grips young writers – and even older writers who should know better. Slowly, poem by poem and book by book, they have built bodies of work that stand beside -- and deserve to be -- considered among the best of our time. n
heartbreak and humor a review by Peter Makuck Timothy McBride. The Manageable Cold. Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2010.
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I’ve recently become more aware of “poems,” essentially word games, formed by what might be called a postmodern or deconstructionist aesthetic – anti-narrative, nothing-beyondthe-text, elliptical, non sequiturial, surreal, nonsensical, impersonal – that increasingly appear in some mainstream literary journals, even in The New Yorker, and on websites like Verse Daily. After reading this kind of – let’s call it “stuff” – I usually scratch my head: What the hell was that all about? And just as quickly answer, I really don’t care. By contrast, Timothy McBride’s poems immediately make us care, put before us experiences and observations we can relate to. Whether about love, death, family, priests and nuns, famous boxers, a dishwasher, Shakespearean bawdy, jazz, birds, mice, dogs, or horses, the poems give us to ourselves in fresh and insightful ways and unfold with compelling story, humor, energy, and trustworthy language. These poems understand the brutal paradoxes of love and the inevitability of loss but nonetheless reach for ways that help us manage the resultant cold. This impressive debut volume begins with “Snow Fence,” a dark narrative that has the speaker remembering and wondering about his grandparents, realizing he might never know “[w]hat turned them against each other” because it was nothing they could say to me, the grandson, who would come each week
See the interview with and poems by Peter Makuck in NCLR 2007. His poems also appear in the 1995 and 1996 issues, and he interviewed NCLR’s Founding Editor, Alex Albright, for the 2002, tenth anniversary issue. Timothy McBride works at SAS Institute in Cary, NC. His poetry has been published in such venues as Shenandoah, Seneca Review, and Poetr y Northwest.
to work for an hour or so cutting the grass, raking leaves, shoveling the sidewalk and the driveway.
What has driven them to separate rooms, silent meals, even a refusal to sound each other’s name? The speaker cannot say, but he does remember something they did together, the three of them putting up a snow fence, “how they stayed each end of the coiled wire” while he “moved back and forth