North Carolina Miscellany
that there are other ways to be destroyed. I knew that you could walk for years along the shores of Molokai and not see what was eating you alive.
McBride may have given up on religion, but still he finds ways to manage the cold and to be uplifted by friends, family, music, birds, and a dog. His work is full of affirmation, and he celebrates even the memory of man-made things, like a new dishwasher in his boyhood home. I like the way in “Grace After Meals” he uses those church words to describe how he and his siblings worshipped this machine, “knelt” and listened to its “spun music.” It was their “Jericho of waste”:
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A squat, boxed promise, it glowed green as dawn across its numbered dials, no mistake beyond absolving, its staid confessional calm guaranteed to reign forever, whirled without end. “Amen,” we answered, cleaned and scrubbed and lullabied to sleep, its broken iambs cradling our dreams: Rinse-Wash-Rinse-Wash-Rinse-Rinse-Dry.
The whole poem had me smiling, the pun “whirled without end” laughing out loud. From heartbreak to comedy, skillfully using open forms, sonnets, and villanelles, McBride’s work reveals variety and ambition, surprise and delight. This is a worthy first volume. n
Dorianne Laux Receives 2011 Roanoke-Chowan Award North Carolina Literary and Historical Association Meeting Raleigh, NC, 14 November 2011 I’m pleased to present the 2011 Roanoke-Chowan Award to Dorianne Laux of Raleigh for her fine collection of poetry called The Book of Men. This prize couldn’t be timed better for this book. Last month, Philip Levine became the Poet Laureate of the United States; The Book of Men is dedicated to him; it includes a poem called “Mine Own Phil Levine”; and above all it is firmly in the tradition of American working class poetry, a tenacious strain that stretches from Levine back through James Wright, William Carlos Williams, and Walt Whitman, writers who like Dorianne Laux knew from personal experience that “hard work / was the order of each day” and wrote fresh, honest poems about labor and laborers and their unromanticized lives. That is a tradition very much at home here in North Carolina, a state built on the backs of its yeoman farmers and mill hands. Laux, as I say, is a working-class poet, by experience and practice, but with an obvious difference from all the aforementioned writers: she is a woman. That doesn’t mean her work is any less tough than theirs – it is emphatically not – but it does mean that she brings a welcome and somewhat new perspective to this kind of poetry and to the subjects of her poems, which include working in Alaska, learning to drive, stealing a lighter, homicide detectives, a pregnant mare, a mother lost in Costco, and “The Mysterious Human Heart in New York.”
The title of The Book of Men is not ironic or sarcastic or angry. In fact, many of its clear-eyed poems are about men, not just Phil Levine but also a soldier in an airport, an old boyfriend, Bob Dylan, and a foster brother. Laux begins her poem “Men” by saying, “It’s tough being a guy, having to be gruff / and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh / it off.” It would be too glib to call her poetry a “celebration” of men or of her other subjects, but – despite this work’s intense engagement of the loss, darkness, silence, and death that visit us all – she does write what one poem calls “anti-lamentations,” inviting us to “Regret nothing,” to savor the basic pleasures that can be found in a plain old apple, in Cher before all that plastic surgery, in the human back, in a “dog moon” that inspires local howling, and in the color gold found in very unlikely places. There are many verbal pleasures to be found in The Book of Men – for example, Mick Jagger “yowling / with his rubber mouth,” with his “rugose cheeks and beef / jerky jowls,” his skinny self onstage “fluttering like the pages / of a dirty book.” I encourage you to read this book aloud, and to feel how its poems resonate in the mouth, the ear, the body. This is sensual, sensuous, well-made poetry. n
Dorianne Laux teaches poetry in the MFA program at NCSU. The Book of Men (W.W. Norton, 2011) is her fifth collection.
UNC–CH creative writing professor Michael McFee received the Roanoke-Chowan Award in 2001 for Earthly (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001). NCLR has published his poems in 1997, 2008, and 2010 and reviewed his books in 1994, 2002, and 2008.
Courtesy of Quail Ridge Books
presentation remarks by Michael McFee