Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita (review)

Among the 108 poems in Hurricane Blues written by almost as many poets are these lines by Diane Elayne Dees, in a poem with the deceptively innocent title “Things To Do While You Wait for the Roofer”:

Drive to New Orleans and marvel at how easily you can find a parking place now. Momentarily forget yourself and try to visit your old haunts. Count the refrigerators on each block. Go to Lakeview and see the empty houses, the cars left in parking lots, tossed together—giant playing pieces on a board game. Banks, restaurants, coffee shops, schools, churches, gas stations, grocery stores, pharmacies, gift shops— all dark, abandoned, boarded. . . . . . . . . . . . . Pour yourself a drink and watch the news. Get a grip on your rage.

(159–60)

As with “Things To Do While You Wait for the Roofer,” many poems in this impressive and compelling collection feature searing images and evocative rage—sometimes barely concealed, sometimes taking center stage—while still others introduce us to memorable figures—famous, infamous, and unknown—who are described, celebrated, derided, and memorialized as a result of the catastrophe visited on Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Gulf Coast by the hurricanes named Katrina and Rita.

Philip C. Kolin and Susan Swartwout have put the collection together both as a way of capturing the history and as an effort to contribute to the healing. As they put it in their introduction:

We want this collection not only to record history but to serve in some way as a balm, a relief effort toward the inevitable reconstruction of the region. Accordingly, all proceeds from Hurricane Blues will go toward the relief effort. This is poetry as bread, cast upon the surface of the waters.

(14)

Following a touching and determined brief memoir by Darby Diane Beattie (a “Katrina survivor”), the collection presents the poems arranged under headings that follow the chronology of the experience of the hurricanes (especially Katrina) themselves: Looming; Landing; City Under Siege, Under Water; Aftermath; Mourning; Resolutions.

The poets themselves are from around the country, confirming that the nation as a whole (not just Louisiana and Mississippi—though especially Louisiana and Mississippi) was wounded by the losses experiences during those awful days in 2005.

Any collection involving some 100 writers is likely to have some unevenness, and Hurricane Blues is no different. Readers will find different poems differently engaging and accomplished, and, indeed, some poems are more memorable because of the candor or emotion and rhetoric than the quality of the verse. On the whole, however, the collection is impressive for its variety—of subjects, modes, and genres—and its compelling interests.

Many of the poems are heart-wrenching, and the collection as a whole stands as a powerful reminder of experiences, emotions, responses, and testimonies that we cannot afford to treat as merely historical phenomena. Indeed, it is evident that some of the emotions remain vivid and raw, as the devastation of the experience is placed alongside the incompetence and insensitivities of governmental officials and agencies. Making the loss and the incompetence even more outrageous are the compelling examples of the extraordinary courage and heroism of the most ordinary of citizens.

On occasion it is the “government” or “politicians” that are the object of ridicule:

For close to a week I watched as the city became water and thousands huddled on rooftops or jammed into stadiums, and did nothing   I felt like a government.

(Tim Hurley, “Projection” 81)

The politicians are more concerned with looting than rescuing or bottled water or diapers while the head of a nursing home fled leaving the patients to fend for themselves. Let the finger pointing begin

(Martin Willitts, Jr., “Hurricane Katrina” 75)

At times we are reminded of specific individuals who gained notoriety for action or inaction, including Michael D. Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”), and the payer of that compliment, President Bush:

While the politicians drone and the...