Listening for the Crack of Dawn (review)

negative may just come from the reviewer's need to prove she read with great care. Reading Marion's poems with great care is the sweetest kind of pleasure. He has a nearly flawless ear: his easy-toswallow unpretentious iambic lines are always appropriate to his subjects. There is something beautifully unteased about his metrics, his easy handling of alliteration and assonance—so beautiful, so easy that one forgives his little fetish for & instead of and. But that little fetish may not really require forgiveness; perhaps it is just his way of keeping the lines as tight as possible by scrapping a couple of unnecessary letters. The syntax is standard—no prodding and poking and torturing of natural rhythms of Enlish speech; yet each line has great poetic tension. There are poems about the thirst for home, for natural sounds in the woods, for bird song, for smells of earth and ginger. There are poems that are intensely weather aware, that count the time of day and time of year as important concerns , but the most consistent references are to dark and home. Some of the dark images have already been quoted but notice this line from "Barsha Buchanan 1858-1919": Always the honeyed light of home. Much of Marion's poetic power lies in the grace of his rhythms, the absence of affection, but sometimes he strikes an effective original note with a single word as in "Politics in the Country: A Letter to Dan Leidig": The crows are in caucus again and from "Gifts": the river trees are shawled in mist (my italics). One of my favorite poems in the collection is "The Chinese Poet Awakens to Find Himself Abruptly in East Tennessee ," but every reader will have his/her favorite. In general the poems in Section III, though fine, don't seem quite as memorable, don't leave quite so deep a mark. I am not sure why this is the case, so perhaps shouldn't mention it at all, especially since the last poem in the collection, "Song for Gene," is a very appropriate way to end. It has that slight vein of melancholy coupled with a determined making joyous do with what's at hand: natural sounds, natural smells, books: I opened your Life of Boone: smell of wild ginger lifted from the pages twining & rooting: today a song rises like smoke from this woods-hearth: homestead where all our words grow warm. See what I mean? -Mary Ellen Miller Davis, Donald D. Listening for the Crack of Dawn. August House, Little Rock, Arkansas. 224 pages. $17.95. hardback. Don Davis is best known by Public Radio listeners and a lot of other folks as a storyteller. For twenty years he was also a Methodist minister in his native Western North Carolina. Now retired from the ministry, he is a full-time storyteller and writer. These stories grew out of his humorous oral routines that he performs all over the country about growing up in the 50s and 60s in fictional Sulpher Springs in Nantahala County. The narrator chronicles his life from his first day at school when he pees his pants, an event observed and announced 69 by classmate Carrie Boyd, to the time, as a young man, when he goes to a dance with the same Carrie and her parents and finds himself in a similar situation on the long journey home after too many trips to the punch bowl. Many colorful characters emerge from the stories, such as great-aunt Laura, who has her greatnephews up listening for the crack of dawn, and other interesting possibilities; Miss Daisy Boring, whose pedagogical techniques belie her name, as she takes her students on an imaginary trip around the world; Daff-knee Garlic, born without kneecaps so that his legs bend either way, making it possible for him to run backward as well as forward, and who delights in catching those who slip in without paying to his drive-in theater; and Red McElroy, who is always losing the keys to his truck and therefore wires it so that he can start it by pushing in the ashtray and the cigarette lighter at the same...