Crooked Run: Poems (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Reviews Henry Taylor. Crooked Run: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Limited cloth edition, $45.00; paper $16.95 Crooked Run is a stream that, as its name indicates, meanders through Loudoun County in northern Virginia, on its way, afterjoining itself with other creeks and branches and rivers, to the Potomac, the Chesapeake Bay, and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. The county itself, founded officially in 1757, is then nearly 250 years old, the creek obviously much, much older, flowing through forests and farms, through hunt country and encroaching suburbia, soon to be lost, for a time at least, in urban spread and sprawl. It moves quietly through recorded history and carries memory with it, even as the one becomes codified and depersonalized and the other fades and disappears year by human year. As Henry Taylor puts it, echoing the ancient wisdom of Heraclitus: Here is the stream I can't set foot in twice, however often it has drawn my steps to thread known rocks and trees toward a place where the sharp surge of recollection shapes itself then fades, as brightness fades and drops groundward when another day's work is done. Crooked Run, Henry Taylor's important new book of poems (winner of the 2006 L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award), is at once celebratory and elegiac and seeks out, by "paths engraved on inward maps," the life once lived along the stream's banks, transmuting as it goes those lost days and ways into lasting poetic form. The poems are meditative and personal in a way that we have become used to in Taylor's work, but they are now even deeper and more reflective than ever, while at the same time never losing their enthusiasm for family history, neighborhood legend, the told tale, the tall tale, or, as George Garrett puts it (in a story in his new collection, Empty Bed Blues), "those stories that become a kind of common property that, in the absence of anything more than myth and memory, we can freely choose to remember or doubt." 90 As Taylor walks along the banks of Crooked Run, he remembers things and events that he has actually seen as well as those tales that he remembers hearing again and again, always with the enthusiasm of a local historian determined to save what precious orts and shards he can, while at the same time always aware of the ambiguity of his relationship to a lost and only remembered past, as in "A Crosstown Breeze," when a drift of wind brings the scent of alfalfa and with it memories of youthful work in the fields: So I keep asking, as I stand here, my cheek still basking in that trick of air, would I live that life if I had the chance, or is it enough to have been there once? Grounded at its center by a long, "found" poem, "My Dear Sister Hannah," which is "closely taken" from a letter from Carrie Taylor to her sister, written in December of 1864, detailing fears and losses suffered in wartime, which, of course, transcend time and place, this collection of poems continually laments those inevitable fears and losses of life and time, and most especially the loss of this entire small but precious world, as in "Aka Fawn Meadow": When mercury lamps wash out the Midnight Sky And in Wooded Glen the bulldozed maples wilt, settlers will ply the chemistry of the lawn and high-priced rubber graze the fresh asphalt beneath which lies the Meadow of the Fawn. But even more often—and this is what gives this book, to my mind, its special flavor and value—these poems celebrate and preserve the very life the loss of which it laments. With Homeric delight in epic accounts of the lives of simple men and women, Taylor tells tale after tale of heroic feats, victories and defeats, those of his own Quaker family (among them Henry Taylors of different generations) and of their neighbors. He speaks, often in a syllabic verse that allows him 91 the opportunity to use vernacular speech with poetic discipline and intensity, of these people with great affection and...