Works & Days by Dean Rader (review)

149 Book Notes only briefly, before they are again forced to shift. Many of these stories, so frequently told from the perspective of children or young adults, are stories about growing up—or the illusion of doing so. One finally masters the mystical and terrifying world of childhood only to wake up in the banal and crushing atmosphere of adulthood. And then the winds there start to shift. This alertness also sets Call’s collection apart from so much magical realism and quirk where the mundane gets weird and that’s it; instead, a profoundly strange world gets stranger and what comes into sharp focus are the all-too-human yet still unexpected ways his narrators bumble and swerve through these curiously gentle end of days. Works & Days, by Dean Rader Truman State University Press, 2010 reviewed by Eric Weinstein Modeled on the poetic work of the same name by the Greek writer Hesiod, Dean Rader’s Works & Days (winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize) is, like its namesake, an account of labor , the various roles it plays in our lives, and its relationship to other aspects of our worldly experiences, human and non-. In “Ocean Beach at Twilight: 14,” Rader asks: “Who’s to say the stars understand / their heavy labor, or the moon its / grunt work across the hard curve of absence?” To the poet, labor is not the province of mankind alone, but its joys and sorrows are our own to bear. The narrator’s presence, often underplayed or even absent in the idyllic poems of other writers imitating the classical style, firmly grounds Rader’s poetry in the phenomenology of human life. In the opening poem, “Traveling to Oklahoma for My Grandmother’s Funeral, I Write a Poem about Wallace Stevens,” Rader writes about “the priest attending to Stevens” who swore “he made a deathbed conversion // To Catholicism, a claim his daughter denies. / I deny him nothing.” The agency of Rader’s narrator, his ability to offer confirmation or denial even in the face of his grandmother’s perishing, brings the simple facts of his labors—travel, burial—into line with the emotional landscape of his days. colorado review 150 Whereas Hesiod’s text serves as a sort of hybrid mythology, farmer’s almanac, and moral treatise, Rader’s is somehow subtler . His poems draw out the stories and epiphanies stirring below the surface of description and philosophical query. Instead of Hesiod and Perses, the principal voices of the 700 bc Works and Days, Rader takes up the personae of Arnold Lobel’s children ’s book characters, Frog and Toad. (One wonders whether this owes something, at least in part, to Lobel’s last Frog and Toad title, 1979’s Days with Frog and Toad.) In “Frog and Toad Confront the Alterity of Otherness,” Rader explores the epistemological questions of knowing whether one exists—and the ontological mystery of existence, period—through the interaction between the two friends. The poem ends: Good old Frog, he thinks. That bastard knows I hate toast. Toad spreads the jam like a man might smooth mortar on a brick for which there is no building. Thank you, he says. Thank you Frog. Rader’s poetry is remarkable in that it so often simultaneously attends to the reader’s senses of emotional, rhetorical, and aesthetic urgency; his poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant. If there is an underlying fault in Works & Days, it is that its author occasionally substitutes bloodless abstraction for the emotionally salient image, as in the poem “Song for the Shell Shaker”: “Maybe it was the day when something passed / between the woman / and the words she spoke, / a private understanding / like the silent nods of the blind.” “Ocean Beach at Twilight: 14” draws the reader’s attention to “the beach’s pillar of stillness”; “Ocean Beach at Twilight: 41” invites us to “drink up the darkness.” These abstractions detract from the force of the work, its emotional import. We want the blood! We want to 151 Book Notes see the labor and sorrow, the victories and joys that life entails...