Blue Yodel by Ansel Elkins (review)

Ansel Elkins’s 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize-winning book Blue Yodel contains lyric elegies that are full of people who have lost something or live lost— by choice or fate—on the margins: a goat man, a girl with antlers, widows, orphans, grieving parents, a tired wife. Blue Yodel is Elkins’s imagination on fire, hinged to the sounds of the Deep South. In an interview with Oxford American, Elkins fleshes out how her imagination and her book are deeply rooted in Alabama: “I could never know myself without these red clay hills, without the native music of saying the names of places like Talladega, Tuscaloosa, Tallapoosa. There’s such an intimate knowledge I feel with this landscape where I grew up.”

Elkins opens with “Blues for the Death of the Sun,” which tells the story of a town as it mourns the loss of its light source, literally the sun. And like the title, it is musical. The speaker contends with the South’s destructive history and its psychological effects:

We saw the sun vanish. Like crows, the people of my town pace the streets, faces skyward [ . . . . ] I watched as the people of my town tore down a man with their bare hands; They say he stole the light with his curse. But I thought he was only talking to himself.

I ask the sky, How come your hands left us?

These are place-poems—committed to the southern soil, the bodies below and above it—that shout sounds of healing. “Our sky, bereft. Our heart muscle, lit into blue flame gnaw for light that lies beneath our skin. / We’ve turned to flames / Like a house burning itself from the inside out.

Elkins was raised by her mother but spent quality time with her father, a photographer for a newspaper. After he died, Elkins wrote poems. Blue Yodel examines death—the ultimate margin. She explains how she started writing in the middle of the night: “I was real depressed during the day and so I slept a lot, but then I’d be wide-awake and restless at night. Rather than lie awake and think about death and time and nothingness, I decided I should try and get out some of that energy by writing.” In “Hour of the Wolf” the speaker addresses the night:

Who is awake but the night watchmen? Or the grim laborer in the graveyard Shift? The spirit world is in transit— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Somewhere at the crossroads of night A man will come to the vanishing line Of his life. All the world he’s known

Closes into a clock of smoke; In that final unannullable hour The self is torn from time and calendar.

Mind undresses from the body, Its clothes of blood and bone As it crosses through the door of death

What is ghost but the echo of a man As he roams his native hills and roads and home?

Her crisp tercets and repetition of the long o sound send the reader to wander in the dark and puts Elkins’s astute ear on display. The poem immediately following, “Reverse: A Lynching,” achieves the same astonishment but in a different form. Each line begins with a prefix that rewinds the scene: return, reunite, untie, rejoin, resheath, unbreak, unsay. The only place this does not happen is in the second line. The poem begins:

Return the tree, the moon, the naked man Hanging from the indifferent branch Return the blood to his brain, breath to his heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reunite the neck with the bridge of his body Untie the knot, undo the noose

The single stanza poem of thirty-seven lines, excluding the final line, stops the reader at line two. That progressive word hanging cements the image the speaker so desperately wants to undo. Then the repetition of sound picks up like a steady march. Elkins’s genius pushes the reader past the enormity of sound and subject with the final lines. They read, with two spaces between them as pause: “Resurrect the dark from...