Rough Fugue by Betty Adcock (review)

Betty Adcock is a poet from East Texas, an area of lush landscape peopled by former Deep South southerners who pushed further west in pioneering days. She has stated that the aim of her poetry is: "To tell the truth and find that it is music." Her honesty is telling and merged with her great command of language, her sharp eye, finely tuned ear, and elevated musicality, rare today. She spins her narratives in deeply heartfelt ways but ways that are never specious but dangerously truthful and passionately beautiful. In short, she perfectly describes her poetic approach with her book's title. Indeed, these finely formed poems are like fugues, each presenting melodically interwoven contrapuntal compositions of language, as well as psychological intervals of loss in identity—a speaker on the edge of losing herself in profound grief. But make no mistake: all this is tempered by a rough understanding and realism. These poems are sturdy constructions plied by nails. I was reminded of the Ohio-native poet James Wright, who wrote so personally and sensitively of nature, the past, of truth and sadness, and found in the midst of his sadness moments of simple epiphany.

A good portion of Adcock's book consists of elegy, poems that cast light on her widowhood after her husband died in 2011. This section is entitled "Widow Poems" and begins with an epigraph from William Cowper: "Grief is itself a medicine." With a certain homespun rough wisdom, Adcock, as if drinking snake venom to build up a tolerance against the fatal poison, addresses her grief head on, imbibes its dark melancholy. It is no surprise to me that she invokes William Wordsworth in her poem "The Widow Reverses Wordsworth," which begins with a short epigraph from the great British Romantic bard:

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,But to be young was very heaven!

To which she follows:

        Yes, bliss and very heaven, allthat I couldn't see for some desire or minorfury at a slight, some shiny distraction.Back then, a long forgetfulness like raindropped over me, a grievous grayunnoticing—how warm, how close, loose,lovely the living body, how dear, how muchthe world.

Granted, Adcock has channeled Wordsworth's heightened lyric language, his nineteenth-century lilt in syntax and diction, but one marvels at the tenor of feeling these lines are fraught with. Who better than in Wordsworth to find a model for speaking of human melancholy and grief wedded to nature. Many modern poets, with less skill and craft, would hold back for fear of sentimentality, but Adcock pushes firmly ahead and by daring honesty of feeling makes it work:

Or the early blooming winter Daphnesweetly open, its fragrance spunacross an afternoon, nothing if notvery heaven—this time not youthbut knowing—death and beingin light and air and wings, in the squirrel'sscribbling in the oak's bare fringe of twigs.

My gone love, this word-picturing isonly a kind of Braille for the abundanceI owe but cannot read, veiled as it iswith what can't be retrieved.Instead, I've gathered your deatharound me like an iron shawl, the lightbattered back, the birds only shrieksin a season of no stars.

Her last stanza elegantly captures the lamentation in Wordsworth's verse and skillfully employs rhetorical chiasmus to create a wonderful formal ending:

knowledge that this day, this very dayseeming to say without, without,is bliss the fog of memory obscure—the very picture        of world that everwas and never can be here

This heightened lyric style is carried forward in another poem "Reach." Again, Adcock's highly rhetorical emphasis, her use of repetition, and a racing rhythm is so perfectly punctuated with the poem's end-word "go." As with the Romantic poets, Adcock is masterful with endings and the classic use of closure. She understands that the abruptly unanticipated, the absent beat, the simple rootless peal can resonate more fully than mere...