Miss Lost Nation by Bethany Schultz Hurst (review)

This impressive first book of poems by Bethany Schultz Hurst, an Idaho State University assistant professor of English, was awarded the 2013 Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize by nationally known poet Richard Blanco. Its three sections contain forty-two poems. While featuring a variety of poetic forms—sonnets, formal stanzas, prose paragraphs, open field and sectional poems—the language is more rational than musical, dependent more on deep image, metaphor, and symbolism than on meter and rhyme. The impression one quickly gets is that these poems contain interlocking layers of signals, hints, codes, and images that point to intentions displayed more than directly expressed. They are complex structures, resonant within themselves and between themselves, with many poems reflecting back upon each other, strengthening the cumulative effect of the entire collection.

The poems convey a sense of purpose that seems to be intentionally deflected by conflicting voices, uncertain how and even whether to make a clear and direct statement. One finds repeating themes, like touchstones, hinting at concerns about ethical behavior, environmental neglect, American culture (and presidents), the body’s sexuality, the West, judgmental attitudes of parents and their legacy (Cold War, small towns, early television), a sense of isolation from family that transcends teenage petulance and angst, and gestures of rebellion off setting a sense of not belonging. The poems use ironic comments as buffers against facing issues directly, perhaps out of concern for being misunderstood. This is not a negative quality. Rather, it makes them intriguing and worthy of deeper study.

Take, for example, the title poem, “Miss Lost Nation,” beginning the second section. Written in three-line unrhymed stanzas, the poem discusses the town of “Lost Nation” (a real town in Iowa) where Hurst’s father grew up, along with Darcy, “Miss Iowa, 1986,” whose face “weathered on a billboard” as the poet grew up admiring her. She confesses: “We have no one there now. . . . We moved out west. I’m the last with the family name.” She describes driving her grandfather “around Lost Nation’s square-mile farms” looking for lost landmarks just before he died (31). The town’s name supposedly came from an immigrant who “wandered into the green valley, asking if anyone had seen his lost nation.” Because we don’t know if he found them, the poet concludes that “you can’t pick up what you weren’t there to hold in the first place” (32).

It isn’t possible in a brief review to do justice to the variety of strong poems, which seem tied to each other by shared images and concerns, despite their different forms and subjects. From the Ice Caves in Idaho to an elegy for Esther Williams and a poem titled “Moon Landing, Faked,” one finds the same layers of bold statements and ironic observations leading in many directions (42). Perhaps the best summary comes from a poem titled “Neither Here nor There” near the end of section 3. The poet apparently is driving in a funeral procession (presumably her grandfather’s) and is uncertain what to listen to on the radio.

Sometimes irony isn’t right and neither is sincerity: the town was named Lost Nation. I ate Jell-O at the reception lunch and I don’t know how to feel about that.

(69)

After rereading the forty-two poems of this provocative collection several times, I still don’t know how to feel about them, either. And that is not a criticism but a compliment.