Driving through the Country before You Are Born: Poems

Foreword

ix Foreword Driving through the Country before You Are Born is a wonderful book, and I am happy to award it first place in the South Carolina Poetry Initiative competition.These forty-six delicately constructed and beautifully descriptive brief poems are marked by an intensity of description and quiet thoughtfulness of voice. The book’s lyrical exploration of the journey from innocence to experience is interestingly situated in a contemporary, postmodernist world that hovers between the rural and the urban, ranging from the farm child’s dream of “a chicken, a house, and an ax,” to the horrifyingly discombobulated collision of culture and nature in “Main Street at Eighty,” where a car wreck that destroys a panhandler on the side of the road “should mean more than crack, block, / or cavity, more than old bolts and sockets,/ lungs and rearview mirrors,” but unfortunately probably doesn’t. Slowly but surely, as the poems unload and unwind, a world lurches into view. First, we see the early life, at the beginning, “when it was all good.” This is a child’s sensory paradise made from fields and trees, and sun and shadows, from “dust / flittering in the sunlight around / the Mason jar on the ruddy brown dresser.” As we recall from our own early lives, all objects and items seem charged and promising, potent with the murky but beguiling promises of the future. At the center of the book’s submerged narrative, however, resides a trauma. And although it never fully emerges into the x story of the poems,we know it through its rupture of the promise of early consciousness. Slowly, reading these poems, we witness the betrayal of early imagination as metaphors transform ripeness into ruin, and it becomes apparent that “everyone knows / there will no longer be such a thing / as being together anymore.”Repetitively,suggestive images of the early,violent death of a boy arise in the poems. It is a death for which the book’s persona feels responsible and in which he may be implicated . Its reverberations reach both forward and backwards through the genealogical ages until no one is innocent, touching upon the Troubles of Northern Ireland, and infecting the contemporary characters in the poems who take a shotgun to pregnant dogs, huff in a grandparent’s garage, and don’t believe in anything anymore.“Maybe that is why / men with broken teeth stand behind us / and hold their broken tongues, shake / their heads in shatter as if you’re already gone.” The book’s exploration of trauma is both psychologically sophisticated and poetically interesting. It makes a serious contribution to our literature by representing the ways in which even the most courageous mind, attempting to confront the source of its trauma, will flinch away at moments, unable to endure its findings or to accept the pain of recalled images and details.We see this beautifully but heartbreakingly portrayed in “The Reprisal,” part of a sequence of a longer poem. Somewhere between then and twenty-seven, my cousin is running up to me, the bottom of his mouth blown to pieces. He slouches back, long neck in front of me, hands cupped against his chest keeping the chunks from falling to the ground.And to think that I’m not so much troubled by the sheer mechanics of it all as I am that I can’t remember xi if it really happened, or if I dreamt it, or thought I dreamt it because I couldn’t accept that it really happened, that I was somehow responsible, that I handed him the match. And although this is a book in which there is no happy ending , no belief in salvation, and no redemption in faith, there is solace of a sort. In “Jonah,” we read, “I found no god / in the belly of a whale, only warmth; / a place that was quiet. I found no god in quiet, / but I liked it there, even though I couldn’t stay.” Perhaps, what we take away from this book is the poet’s solace in the quiet solitude of the writer at work, searching for the temporary consolations of the right word in the right place, and the power of that small act—made over and over again— to keep us alive and to keep us writing. Kate Daniels ...