Texases: Poems by John Poch (review)

Each American state produces its own indelible poems. New York has Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Illinois has Sandburg's Chicago poems, and California has Ginsberg's "Supermarket." But Texas has always seemed to inspire great novelists more than great poets, with Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry among the most prominent. Indeed, Cormac McCarthy's words grace the opening page of epigraphs in Poch's Texases, alongside a verse from Ezekiel. Both McCarthy and Ezekiel speak of places. "You are Texas," says a character from Blood Meridian. The prophet speaks of "The glory which I saw by the River Chebar." Poch follows these epigraphs with a prose poem aptly titled "Texas":

Coyotes suddenly howled in the ditches miles away. Everyone looked at each other, wide-eyed and smiling. And then another group of coyotes a mile in a different direction. I believed it had little to do with the moon and much more to do with the sandhill cranes that had alighted in the cotton fields nearby. The ache of hunger.

The reader can be forgiven for believing that Poch has fallen under McCarthy's spell and will lead his readers through an Old-Testament-haunted prose landscape for the duration of the collection.

But Poch is done with prose poems after this opening salvo. The rest of the poems in Texases are in verse, many with formal elements like rhyme and sometimes strict meter. By the end of the collection, Poch proves himself less an inheritor of McCarthy's or McMurtry's tradition and more a student of the lesser known Texas laureate Vassar Miller. Here, for instance, is the final stanza of Miller's poem "Rivers," from If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems (1991):

River de Brazos de Dios,river of rest and rescues,bear me with lullabies,safe to the arms of Jesus.

And here is the final stanza of Poch's poem "The Brazos":

In the shadow of wind on waterover white rocks moves light to delight,and just downstream aroundthe next bend, high tension wireshold above the scene. They travelto a hospital and to houses—one house where a womanirons shirtsleeves smoothas the arms of God.

Both stanzas tend toward trimeter, though Poch's meter is looser than Miller's, and both are concerned with where the Brazos river leads. Miller describes a simpler movement, being borne to divine arms, while Poch's movement is more labyrinthine: the bend of the river leads to high wires, which lead to both hospitals and homes, and it is in one of the homes the divine arms are found, figured in the ironed shirt.

In the second line from "The Brazos" we see Poch play with the varying meanings of a repeated word: "light to delight." Such repetition risks mere redundancy, but Poch usually manages to avoid that when employing this verbal structure. In his first poem in verse, "God in the Shape of Texas," he plays with the meaning of the word "man":

     a necessary perpendicular walk on the caprockwithout barbed wire might have made a mana man from the expanse.

Poch frames his exact repetition of the phrase "a man" with internal rhymes: "walk on the caprock," and "man from the expanse." To "make a man / a man" also sounds slightly parodic of a sort of mid-century Texan cliché, a phrase that could be at home in the mouth of a John Wayne or Larry McMurtry character.

Poch shows himself alive to the landscape of sound as well as image, piling both rhyme and homonym into impressive chiasms, as in "In Corpus Christi":

the miles long beach,interrupting love and rest.And the rest is loveand relentless sun.

Not only do we have a chiasmic structure of word repetition with "love . . . rest . . . rest . . . love," but we also get the repetition of the vowel sounds from those two words again in "relentless sun." Further, Poch nudges us toward mapping themes from Hamlet onto these lines, echoing Hamlet's final...