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  • Immersed in the Delta
  • CL Bledsoe (bio)
If the Delta Was the Sea, Dick Lourie. Hanging Loose Press: http://www.hangingloosepress.com. 165 pages; paper, $18.00, cloth $28.00.

Dick Lourie is a blues saxophonist, in addition to being a poet. In 1997, he traveled to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to play with renowned blues musician Big Jack Johnson. Since then, he has returned to this vital center of Delta blues every year, drawn by the culture and history of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta area as much as its music. If the Delta Was the Sea, his new poetry collection, grew from Lourie's exploration of the culture and the area.

The book is divided into six sections, five of which end with an installment from a lengthy serialized poem, "The Camel Chronicles," which summarizes and comments on a story, taken from a website, involving a race between a camel and a horse. The story pits Southerners against foreigners and is intended to be a humorous throwaway story of the office humor variety, littered with inside jokes, yet Lourie uses it to elucidate the purportedly xenophobic Southern town of Clarksdale. Prominent townsfolk are recast in exotic roles, everyday locations familiar to any Clarksdale native are suddenly envisioned as the settings for international intrigue.

Lourie states in the introduction to the collection that he had certain preconceptions about the Delta region when he arrived, and the extended analysis of this seemingly trivial story serves as a key opportunity for Lourie to dispel some of these preconceptions. It also allows him to illuminate the closed society of small-town life ("closed" if for no other reason than that these people have lived in the same place and interacted on a regular basis for so long they've developed their own codes, customs, and shared experiences). There are fourteen episodes in the story, which Lourie exhaustively analyzes at a whopping thirty-three pages.

The title poem begins the collection on page fifteen and introduces the reader to Clarksdale and to blues music. "'If the river was whiskey,'" he begins, quoting Big T, a blues singer, "'and I was a / diving duck.'" The line is from an old blues song, and Lourie explores the metaphor, delighted with the conditional mixed with the transformative nature of figurative language. It's an idea he also applies to his surroundings: "if the river was / Clarksdale the Delta would be the sea," he says, implying that the culture of Clarksdale has flowed into and influenced the rest of the Delta region. This is a theme Lourie explores throughout the book. He concludes the poem by committing himself to "diving in" to the exploration of this "sea" by stating that "tonight it would all be intense blue…I might never come up." The conclusion is not only a pleasing image, but it serves to imply that Lourie hopes to not only understand and learn about Clarksdale; he also wants to simply enjoy being immersed in its culture.

Lourie's poems are clean and precise. Many extend to two or more pages. He paints vivid scenes, but these are only catalysts for his explorations of the culture and society of Clarksdale and the Delta region, and of blues music in general. He chronicles veteran performers throughout the book, but he also spends time on younger, up-and-coming musicians in an attempt to show that this musical form, and this region, in general, is still vital. Lourie doesn't gloss over the negative aspects of his subject—the history of oppression, not only of African Americans, but of Native Americans, and the abject poverty made more troubling by the "sharply contrasting affluence" he discusses in his introduction, and he also explores less-often-considered groups in the South, including Italian and Jewish immigrants and their experiences. The poem "Thinking About Clarksdale" brings some of these issues to life. Lourie ponders a cotton field which leads him to an unmarked slave burial ground. He begins to realize that the descendants of some of these slaves and the descendants of their owners may still live in the area. They might even be neighbors. More troubling to him, somewhere along the line, their bloodlines...

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