LET’S REVIEW…Claire Hamner Matturro

LET’S REVIEW…Claire Hamner Matturro

Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing 2023) is a wonderful collection of well-written, powerful poems by 54 different writers with a unifying theme of Dolly Parton. The verses within this sparkling, delicious book are alternately bold, splashy, wise, personal, revealing, poignant, funny, thoughtful and thought-provoking, or more—just like the iconic cultural figure the anthology pays homage to in verse. Encompassing a wide variety of voices, parts of the anthology are akin to a Parton biography in verse, while others reflect the impact the force of nature who is Dolly Parton has had upon the writer. A most enjoyable book and one not to be missed, Let Me Say This is a showcase of talent of established and emerging poets.

Do you need to be a Dolly Parton fan to enjoy this book? Maybe/maybe not. But it would surely be hard to find a reader who is not an admirer of Dolly Parton at some level, either of her life of grace and charity, her music, her style, or humor (or all the above). Do you need to be a devoted reader of poetry? Probably not as these are accessible poems, many with plot arcs and character developments that compare to short stories.

A biographical poem entitled “Seventy-Five Lines for Dolly’s Seventy-fifth” starts the anthology off right and sets the stage for more to come. With rhymed tercets written by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and Julie Marie Wade, this opening poem captures the mystique and contrasts of Dolly Parton with lines like: “I still carry a pistol in my purse, / but my grin’s sincere, my heart’s peaceful / as Baby Jesus in that Bible verse.”

The editors—Julie E. Bloemeke and Dustin Brookshire—are themselves accomplished poets and certified Dolly fans, who contribute their own poems to the collection. In “Dolly Would,” Bloemeke blends Parton biographical details (“as she snuck / out back to press pokeberries to her lips, / line her eyes with blackened match tips”), with lines about the impact Parton had upon Bloemeke’s own life. For example, these excerpted lines start commenting about Dolly but carry over to the poet’s personal life:

A woman married decades who writes

heartbreak like she’s lost every last time,

this country blood in all of her colors, shakes

herself to fire in rhinestone fringe, opens

the butterfly down in me, holds the mic

to the voice I never allowed, says,

own your trash, says make a joyful

noise, …

Dustin Brookshire’s “Dolly at the Fox Theater (2008)” tells the story of taking his mother to a Dolly concert only to find she “looked away like / something else caught her eye” when they see Dolly step down from the bus. At the concert, the mother “fidgeted / in her seat” when Dolly asked if there were any drag queens in the audience. But when Dolly asks if there are any mothers in the audience, Brookshire captures a unifying moment:

Seated with an autoharp,

Dolly told us about her coat of many colors,

and love for her mother. She asked if there were mothers

in the audience, a few yelled,

several hands shot up,

including my mother’s.

Well, I dedicate this song

to all the good mommas out there. I

placed my arm around my mother, squeezed her tight,

leaned my head against hers, gave her that moment.

As reflected by those quotes, the poems in this volume are personal, honest, and heartfelt, and often reflect the comfort Dolly Parton’s life and lyrics have offered the poets. For example, Robert Gwaltney in “Butterflies” writes touchingly and eloquently:

Fly, fly, butterfly.

Boys like me have secret wings.

Dolly’s voice comes through

the screen, streaming

from your sister’s window, a scratched LP,

all of this a rare and gentle thing.