Carver: A Life in Poems (review)

Marilyn Nelson has engaged the extraordinary George Washington Carver as a biographical subject in a book which renews our appreciation of his creative legacy. Framing his life between two major American wars—the Civil War (Carver was born a slave) and World War II (he died in 1943)—she also reminds us of the social and cultural advances characterizing African-American life within the span of a century. Carver's tenure at Tuskegee, and his close kinship with Booker T. Washington, amplify at least one aspect of the progress of a people in achieving identity, self-pride and burgeoning respect from the larger culture.

Few efforts exist in American literature to tell the story of a lived life through poems. Some poets create fictional lives, and often elaborate an important relationship or adventure, but the telling of a real life from beginning to end is rare and then not always successful. It would seem, though, that the choice of poems to convey a biography offers opportunity to represent much about the inner life of the subject, as well as to engage the reader and listener in considering the relation between the historical figure's subjectivity and their own.

Nelson's book is most successful in elaborating the imagination and inspiration behind Carver's contributions. Particularly, she describes Carver's psychic land—the depth and complexity of his attachments, the exceptional imagination he was driven by, his devotional life, the wisdom he developed about the contiguity of lives and the continuity of life, his awe before the natural world. Nelson is also taken with the intimate relation between his aesthetic and scientific sensibilities. In a poem depicting Carver having come across a night-blooming wild petunia ("Ruellia Noctiflora"), Nelson writes,

"If we hurried, I could see it
before it closed to contemplate
becoming seed.
Hand in hand we entered
the light-splattering morning-dark woods.
Where he pointed was only a white flower until I saw him seeing it."

In this poem and others, Nelson demonstrates her appreciation of Carver's gifts through the use of distinct images enriched by the viewer's contemplation, as well as her careful choice of plain and generative language. Her poems embody the modesty we come to appreciate as characteristic of Carver himself, one which highlights the rich potential he sensed lay within the apparently simple. A book published for readers twelve and over, Nelson's poems allow youthful and mature readers alike to glean meaningful information about Carver's life. In a notable poem titled "Clay," she writes,

"God's breath on a compound of silica,
alumina, and various oxides—
primarily iron—gave Adam life.
There is a primal, almost mystical
connection between humankind and clay,
from the footed, bellied first receptacles
to frescoed Renaissance cathedral walls.
To Carver's eye, the muddy creek banks say
Here, to be dug up, strained, and painted on,
is loveliness the poorest can afford:
azures, ochres . . . Scraps of discarded board
are landscapes. Cabins undistinguished brown
bloom like slaves freed to struggle toward self-worth. Beauty is commonplace, as cheap as dirt."

Carver intrigues us not only because of this unusual man's life, but because the book highlights the ordinary dynamic relation between the inner life and life occurring in the nexus of relationships, social experience and history. Nelson suggests that Carver's creativity was not only divinely inspired, but yoked to the purpose of curing wounded souls and the wounds of a society in conflict with other nations and between its peoples. In a memorable poem written at the close of the 20th century ("Bedside Reading"), Nelson places Carver at the turn of that century reflecting on an old bill of sale for his enslaved mother as a 13-year-old girl. As he considered tragedies in her life later, Nelson suggests that Carver's trust in the order of things and events was also crucial to his optimism about the century coming next.

"He turns to the blossoming...