Preparing a Room by Victor Depta (review)

Act ofContrition was penned during that optimistic, post-war period of prosperity when white men were in charge, women wore girdles even in the kitchen, and all seemed good and clean in America. Act of Contrition gives us, for good or evil and with all the biases of an author, a portrait in time and a recipe for 1950s American life. —Marianne Worthington Depta, Victor. Preparing a Room. Martin, TN: Blair Mountain Press, 2001. Victor Depta's most recent collection of poems, Preparing a Room, offers the reader a variety of temptations couched in a series of reflections on the relationship between desire, guilt, and the fulfillment of desire. The poems are told from the perspective of Garvin, a mountain boy who seeks the comfort denied him at his uncle's home in presence of Caleb and Judith, his housekeeper. Caleb's home, however, is not an absolute haven; for while Garvin finds the love and acceptance he needs there, he also learns that being accepted does not mean being fulfilled. We are gently guided to this conclusion by the discovery that Garvin's addition to Caleb's home creates a most unusual erotic triangle. Garvin idolizes and desires Caleb, who returns Garvin's feelings, but with a crucial difference. Caleb does not seek the fulfillment of desire, or at least does not seek the bodily fulfillment of desire. As Garvin soon realizes, for Caleb it is enough to be "free to look" ("The Ginseng") at Garvin's image as he dances naked in the parlor or washes himself in the creek. Despite Garvin's longing for a physical consummation, Caleb holds him apart, "unrequitable and chaste ... naked and unashamed / in a waste of love" ("An Image"). Likewise, though Judith has lived with Caleb for many years, she remains in her "wifeless role as housekeeper" ("The Accent Table and the Houseplants"), her soul "sugared ... in pots" like "berries, peaches, and pears," preserved but "never tasted" ("Judith Comforted"). Treated as a realistic narrative, the lives of these three figures could certainly hold the attention of most readers, but Depta's collection is much more carefully and complexly crafted than this. The surface narrative of sexual desire provides the "parables, allegories and symbols" ("The Genesis Inquiry") through which questions regarding the nature and obligations of community, the human desire for legitimacy, and the nature of God's love for the world are explored. At the end of each of these explorations, these quests for fulfillment comes Garvin's realization that our desires often lead to a "barred gate" where 88 we can only imagine "what's behind that fence / what was left, when the clamor of flesh was stilled" ("Caleb"). Though Depta's poetry is filled with images of failure and enclosure, his vision of the world is not rightly categorized as a dark one. Just as a fence can be built to enclose the object of our desires and separate us from them, so too can someone "prepare ... a room" to enclose us within a house of many desires. And in the end, Depta's poetry seems to ask us, is not this a form of love? Regardless of how one responds to Depta's temptations, his deft mixture of lyrical introspection, visionary interpretation and realistic narrative makes for a rare and pleasurable reading experience. His volume of poetry is a temptation well worth giving in to. —J. Morgan William W. Freehling, The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 238 pages. Preface, index, maps, illustrations, $27.50, cloth. This sparkling analysis of the Civil War by William W. Freehling of the University of Kentucky was first presented as the Littlefield Lectures at the University of Texas. Freehling was invited to speak to address the arguments of Civil War specialist Gary Gallagher that the white South was overwhelmingly loyal to the Confederacy. Using knowledge gained from his exhaustive studies of the South in the 1850s, Freehling presents a compelling case that pro-Union southerners played a decisive role in the conflict. He accomplishes his task by taking a much broader definition of the South than Gallagher does...