A Review of Delta Tears , poems by Philip C. Kolin

(ISBN: 978-1-59948-841-7, 100 pages, $15, Main Street Rag, 2020)

Delta Tears is Philip Kolin’s 11th poetry book. A prolific author, he has published more than 40 books, many of them reflecting his fascination with the Mississippi Delta. The published works include critical and biographical studies of Tennessee Williams, a collection of poems on Emmett Till, and a coedited anthology Down to the Dark River: Contemporary Poems about the Mississippi River.

The poems in Delta Tears underscore the paradoxical nature of this region of the South. As the prologue poem, “The Mississippi Delta,” points out, we always hear “the dark voice of that mud river,/ part corpse, part redemption.” Further emphasizing this dichotomy, Kolin reminds us in “The Mississippi River’s Proclamation” that the Mississippi is “a river of reveries” and “a slave’s ride south to hell.” Reflecting the river’s and the region’s diversity, Kolin offers a variety of poetic types and voices, including biting attacks on slavery and sharecropping, blues-inspired laments, lyrics about Delta landscapes, and surreal visions about the Delta. The poems are divided into six sections— The Old Mud River , Centuries of Tears, Jukes and the Blues, Delta Dogs and Other Critters, Seasons, and Places to Store Memories. The first two sections on the river and the impact of slavery are the heart and soul of Delta Tears. Kolin’s love affair with the river is evident in poems such as “The River’s Music” where “in the Delta moonlight the river turns into a flowing symphony.” But Kolin laments pollution in “The River Cries Muddy Tears” and “Elegy for the River” causing “suffocating air” and driving “the river to emptiness.” Two back-to-back poems—“The Great Flood of 1927” and

“Flooding, 2017”—focus on one of the greatest threats the river poses. In 1927, black men’s lives were lost on levees and barges protecting white property. Here in horrific detail is the recollection of one black man kept prisoner pushing the river back:

When a shotgun blew a hole in my uncle’s chest, we watched his body leak red dirt clots that did little to stop the snake-like currents.

In 2017, “Seawalls and levees melted like sugar in the chicory rain” as coffins, resurrected by the water, “raced down the street.” The poem ends with this haunting line—“The only thing that sparkled in the night were garfish eyes.” In “The Chicago Delta,” after the Great Migration black families rejoiced that their “dreams could not be extradited to Mississippi” or be “chain-ganged to nightmares.” They were relieved “to say goodbye/ to that dark river thirsting for their souls.”

The horrors of slavery and sharecropping pulsate through “Centuries of Tears.” The lead poem “Bodies in Bondage” is a tour de force about the genesis of the slave trade, the horrors of Middle Passage, and the fate of slaves ending up in the Delta.

“On the far side of smiles,” they “came across an ocean of bloody vomit, feces, chains, peeled bones, and limp eyes and then down… the river... [ran] up and down like a snake searching for prey… Flesh sucking fish waited in the still murk for a welcomed suicide.” When their bodies were “sold and resold,” “Song became the only salve for their tongues. Like oarsmen, words carried them into the forbidden territory of hope.”

Kolin’s graphic empathy seeps through each line. In other poems, slaves received the overseer’s “cotton kiss,” a whip; elsewhere slaves were “sold as corpses” in “blistering slave markets” during a Yellow Jack epidemic since slavers declared “Jack would not infect black skin.” The pleasures of uncaring white Southerners are contrasted with black suffering in “Delta Cotillions,” where bloodstained eyes were ordered to remain downcast and their sentences chained to slave syllables.” In one of the best poems in Delta Tears “Who Owns What in Sharecropping” Mister Charlie emblazons his name on the roof of each worker’s cabin and owns punishments such as “lynchings” and the “Black Codes” while sharecroppers own “boll weevils, floods, rickets, rocks, tornadoes, drought, dust, the debt … nightmares and despair, worn out lives and smiles

...and pine boxes but not the land they will be lowered in … Mister Charlie owns that.”

Perhaps the most frightening poem is “Parchman Prison Farm” with its “20,000 acres of agony.” Contemporary “enslaved America” punishes inmates for breathing too much (echoes of Eric Garner), and makes them drink water that is “flavored/ with mud and maggots.” The air is in “constant lockdown . . biting like fire ants in your eyes.”

The opening poem in “Blues and Juke Joints,” “Juke Houses” is a litany of places, patrons, and scores satirizing “white-face prying police” who dare not enter the sanctum of black music. There patrons meet a “funk-loving Jesus” who scoffs at the sign that reads: “Negroes and dogs allowed,” ironically undercutting segregation’s barriers. In only three stanzas in “Hospice for the Blues,” Kolin isolates some quintessential elements of the blues—betrayed love, voluptuous bodies, a cruel nature:

What ever happened, a man asks, to that woman with a ramshackle smile and those wide come-my-way swinging hips that promised me forever but with just a wink brought more agony than a mule felled by fire ants.

In “Bluesmen at Dawn” tired musicians “gather outside the locked juke with their brown/sugar mash and tales about a woman / whose heart beats like a snare drum” Their memory runs wild long after the juke closes but right before they return “to the plantations/ their stories ploughed under, or carried/in poke sacks that grow heavier with the years.” Kolin scores three original blues poems—“Deep Down Blues,” “Velvet Blues,” and “Three Ladies Blues,” paying tribute to several blues legends—Billy Holiday, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey. Other poems pay tribute to pop singers (e.g. Sam Cooke) mightily influenced by the blues and B.B. King whose “Thrill will never be gone.” “The Blues Bus,” carries a “pilgrimage of voices” from suffering from the forlorn love but as “darkness swallows their voices,” the bus “has moved beyond memory, and words.”

In “Delta Dogs and Critters” and “Seasons” Kolin’s poems change tone and tenor. He playfully characterizes the Delta’s ubiquitous mosquitoes as “rebel angels from heaven’s cool alpine air” who “resemble shrunken minotaurs down here.” nesting in “quicksand and fire.” In “Ode to Catfish,” the Delta’s “totem animal” becomes the “whiskered reincarnation of fish gods,” their replicas found in “front of stores, restaurants, and gas stations.” Tongue in check, Kolin declares that “Belzoni has surpassed ancient Babylon” in honoring them. In “My Fair Ladybug,” Kolin lyrically personifies these tiny creatures as “April’s grandmother” who “preserve springtime greenery” with their “Seurat-symmetry.” An entire city of them can fit “inside a gallon lemonade jug.” But, as with the Mississippi, Kolin knows that there are sinister forces lurking in the Delta. In autumn’s “Raptor Winds,” a “silky Maltese weighing less than a pile of leaves” is carried off by a red wing hawk while nomad dogs in search of “swamp water and field rats roam the Delta nights.” Hauntingly, crows, the Delta’s “dark undertakers,” intone “one-word requiems” as they swoop down in this “country of corpses,” e.g., in trees where “victim nestlings” are in their “last faint of breath,” on highways where “pieces of flesh are left behind,” and in fields as they carry off the hunter’s spoils and “the wind goes silent.” A beautiful poem on the stages of a sparrow’s life from its “rookery” where it is fed by “a mouth with wings,” to feeling “plumed desire” in “sun showers,” and in “tales of lustered flight,” and unlike noisy pelicans, “sparrow’s song is enough.” Crows and sparrows, hawks and ladybugs, the complex menagerie of Kolin’s Delta.

Lyricism and terror fold into each other in poems on the passing seasons. Bucolic splendor bursts out in poems on spring ponds and gardens, summer retreats, and autumnal skies of “silk and lavender clouds.” Proclaiming “the world needs gardens,” Kolin alludes to one of the Delta’s most romantic rituals: “In springtime comes hurrahs/ for the progeny of last year’s/ debutantes—lacecap, hydrangea/ blue sage, heather and impatiens.” In the “Blessings of Spring,” he personifies a Delta landscape where “trees rustle to touch each other/ as if limbs and leaves were searching/ for lost lovers.” Evocative of the Romantic poets, Kolin exquisitely describes a pond “during gentle noon light/layered rainbows crown/top water and patch channel gaps.” But Kolin never lets readers forget about the other side of beauty and tranquility in the Delta. In winter, “Creeks freeze/ and cash crops go bankrupt—/spurs, choke weeds, rotting rocks/ [become] a market for despair.” Winter weeds with their “fusillade of springs and sprigs” set out to unseed early spring’s “untried grass.”

“A Delta Hurricane,” “The Dirty Side of the Storm,” or “A Eulogy for a Tree” also jerk us back from an idyllic Delta. Once “a child’s dream house,” a “neighborhood aviary,” an “artist loft,” the Delta tree is beset by “beetle borers girdling its limbs and torso in black crepe;/it stood stiff as an obelisk” in winter. Like Kolin’s fanciful riff on mosquitoes, “Humidity in the Big Easy” flows with hilarity—“Your glasses go blind”; “You are sweating more than a Preakness horse”; “You hallucinate that you take a swamp tour/ and see Dante passing in a pirogue.”

The poems in Kolin’s last section range from “The Delta Queen’ personified as a Cleopatra-like siren running through “the dark world/ she depends on to keep her illusions bright” to the brothels of “Storyville” where “an urn of cemetery dirt is complementary in each room” to Williams’s “Moon Lake” to “Chinese Grocery Stores, Circa 1935” where the owners “spoke Delta to their customers” but “Chinese at home.”

Among Kolin’s best work are poems on “The Old Cotton Field Church” an “ark sailing across Delta heat haze/ carrying 40 souls every Sunday” and “Soil,” “the Delta’s definition and its paradox.” The collection ends with a solemn poem on the shrine of Madonna of the Delta that offers a “retreat” from “wounding remarks.”

I highly recommend Delta Tears.