Haskell (review)

The title of the book comes from the little milkweed seeds with their white skirts that carry them afar. McNeill writes: In the late summer, when the long, delicate green milkweed pods were full, we would strip off the outer pods and carefully take out the silky white insides. These were our "milkweed ladies," as pure and delicate as soft white dove-birds, there on our rock cliff in the sun. We would invite them to "tea," and crowded three of them sitting so ladylike on our moss sofa; and we in our millinery hats serving them. Most of the book is about departed family members who still live in stories, the natural beauty of McNeill's place, about farming, gathering the fruit of labor and preserving it for the winter, about living in an earlier time, a time that seemed simple and idyllic in the perceptions of this poet. But, of course, Louise McNeill went away to school, married, had a son, eventually earned a Ph.D. in history, became a teacher, traveled the larger world. Then that great agent of change, World War II, came into her life, and she ends the book with her remembrance of the August night, 1945, in the Commodore Hotel in New York when she picked up a paper and saw the news of the bombing of Hiroshima : That was the night the world changed. It wasn't joy that died, or faith, or resolution; for all these came back. It was something else, something deep and earth-given that died that night in the Commodore. Never again would I be able to say with such infinite certainty that the earth would always be green in springtime, and the purple hepáticas come to bloom on my woodland rock. For these, the earth and its seasons, had always been my certainty-going beyond death, beyond the death of all my people, even beyond the death of the farm; the sun in the morning, the darkness at night, the certain roll of the seasons, the "old blue misties" sweeping out of the north. This is a pretty book as well as a pleasant one to read, with line drawings of milkweed seeds and all manner of other wild and domestic flowers. It will bring an appreciation of a singular lady whether or not you have read her poems-but you'll want to do that too. -Loyal Jones Ed Davis. Haskell. Seven Buffaloes Press, Box 249, Big Timber, Montana, 59011. 1987. Cover and text photos by Vickie Church. Paperback: $5.00. Haskell is a fictional character modeled after the poet's grandfather. You don't read about him in this book, you listen to him reminisce. He talks about his wife, who "cooked meals / to make a man accept Christ . . . stretched a dollar till / ol' Washington squealed, / an' never stopped huggin' / me porchswing close." He mourns his son Alton, who died in World War I, and though Haskell feels now that his country should never have entered the war, he admits "I didn't think so / then, when I saw m' son in uniform, grinnin' like sin." Haskell has "Depression on the Brain," can't forget the years when he "et fried tater skins so your mama had milk" and "cut timber / fer a dollar a day." Sometimes he sits alone and tries to "Drink These Memories Down." Though Haskell is "as big with ghosts" from the past as his wife 'usta git with child," he also speaks of the present. When he does, he often complains about the indignities of old age. He tells us what he is too proud to tell his relativesthat he can "barely make it to the John," or that he "fell on the furnace, smelled m' flesh burn till / 1 rolled off and passed out." Sometimes he complains about the nonsense of modern times, about "newfangled pissgreen fire engines" that just 64 make more noise than the old ones, about people who don't appreciate what they have or realize how lucky they are, about Jehovah's Witnesses and Republicans , about taxes. These poems reveal a reverence for what life can teach a person; they inspire a feeling...