Review of City of Hey Baby, Poems by Patrice Melnick

Thomas Bonner, Jr.

Review of City of Hey Baby, Poems by Patrice Melnick

(Finishing Line Press, 2020, 27pp)

“Dear Rock n Bowl,/ Your bowling lanes are uneven…” strikes a quirky note about a quirky place and an equally quirky New Orleans. “Rock n Bowl,” brief and rhythmic, captures the intriguing nature of a place of dancing and bowling, a place like New Orleans, where the expected fails to occur and the unexpected sinks its treble hook into both its residents and visitors. City of Hey Baby is a celebration of its mind and heart. The poetry has a spontaneous quality, a musical cadence (“synchronized pounding”), and images that reflect the sources of its inspiration. Having come to New Orleans after time in Alaska and the Central African Republic, Patrice Melnick spent thirteen years living in shotgun styled houses along the Mississippi River and near Bayou St. John. Her years of teaching at Xavier University of Louisiana, an historically Black University, introduced her, a native of Dallas, Texas, to the dominant ethnic and racial community of the city.

Dance, a central element of her and the city’s lives, leaps forward in the first poem “Dancing at Tipitina’s After the Flood,” as “I sway in the blue/ arms of ‘God knows whom.’” Like so many references to the city, before-and-after the flood of 2005 is a dividing line here, and the poem revels in the spirit of a people pushing “past weary houses and yards of car corpses.” The damaged appliances stand street side in “Refrigerator Lesson”: “dented metal boxes/ bursting with despair.” As in Melnick’s memoir Po-boy Contraband: From Diagnosis Back to Life (based on her earlier book Turning Up the Volume), dance and music contribute to poems throughout this slim but rich volume. “Sunday gospel music” rises above damage in “Fifty Days After Hurricane Katrina on Dumaine Street.” In

“How I Came to Understand Boudin,” Melnick writes, “We zydeco dance and the morning swirls/ with color.” In “A Reporter Who Parties,” a “lost daughter” enters “the rhythm of any song/ a polka, a Texas 2-step” and locks “into the French Louisiana/ waltz.” Dancers in a second line “highstepped, crossing and uncrossing legs” as Mathew, the eponymous title character of the poem, leaps from a bar to join the mourners. A woman leaps aboard a bus in “Magnifique” with a dance-like style that brings the poet to write, “what a move!”

Melnick’s poems bring out her contact with a population that gets little attention literally and imaginatively in New Orleans. In “Dancing at Tipitinas after the Flood,” the narrator goes to dance with unknown men. Andrea in “French Quarter Railings” drops her keys from the balcony to let the poet enter “this second floor flat/ of chaos and freedom.” In “Dead Woman in Winter,” a hardly known Button finds a corpse of a homeless woman. During bowling in “Tattoos and Birthmarks,” the narrator begins to know Joe through the iconography etched into his skin. We have already met Mathew, who suffers from an excess of alcohol, leaves the city, and dies in Galveston: “They threw your ashes into the ocean/ and dust danced in the rhythm of the winds/ in the musical rush of the waves.”

The title poem, which closes the volume, is a reflection on life in this old American city. The first line of each of the eight stanzas asserts a feature or characteristic of the city, most bleeding into the subsequent lines: “New Orleans is the city of ‘Hey Baby,’/ from the coffee shop waitress, the delivery/ man, the telephone operator….” Throughout the volume Melnick shows an awareness of language being part of local experience, both charming as in the previous passage and a warning as in “Dumaine Street”: “’Hello’ means/ too many things.” Food emerges as well in her title poem: “Port of Call burgers,” and in other poems: “a chocolate croissant,” “boudin,” and “lemon pound cake.” Melnick discovers, as so many have, that New Orleans and South Louisiana are places of the senses.

This collection of poems has the feeling of a farewell letter to a lover. In the aftermath of the flood of 2005, Melnick left the city for the village of

Grand Coteau in Southwestern Louisiana, the heart of the Cajun (Acadian) country. Afterward, she writes of the city, “I am visiting a place where I once lived./ I am visiting the person I used to be.” In “Walking Through Palmetto Swamps,” she reveals her new self as she walks through the swamp with her husband Olan talking about mutual experience, “I turned the page and he has already/ whistled his way in.”