The Persimmon Tree Carol (review)

which says "Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society" strumming a guitar as she sings of sisterhood, satisfaction, and happiness. When the performer sings "? don t want no man who'll leave me/ to sing the blues in the night,'" Annie wonders how this singer knows so much, and considers how she (Annie) ". . . only knows what she don't want/ after she's had it awhile." Annie listens to a younger man she's seeing, someone who explains he is withholding commitment until he discovers himself—and remembers how she set out, after a failed relationship, in "a Toyota wagon stuffed:/ two children, luggage/ houseplants and sixty-pound/ dog drooling on her neck,/ driving through a veil of heat,/ Patsy Cline on the radio,/ [her] eyes pickling in brine" (Generation Gap"). In the final poem, "After the Funeral," daughters go through their deceased mother's clothing and jewelry. Looking for signs of their father, who left years ago, they come on a Bible containing ". . . a photograph/ torn down the middle:/their mother with dark hair./ dress draping over her/ slender form, wearing nigh/ heeled shoes, a man's hand/ tightly holding her waist." Through the use of telling detail, Murphy renders psychological states, creates characters, or suggests complex situations. Attractively designed and produced by Carolyn Page and Roy Zarucchi, editors of the journal Potatoe Eyes and of other chapbooks in the Nightshade Press series, Annie's Night Out is a welcome first collection by an intelligent and gifted poet. -Jim Wayne Miller Stephenson, Shelby. The Persimmon Tree Carol. Nightshade Press (PO Box 76, Troy, Maine, 04987), 1990. How much do we really know about our parents? They conceive us, give birth to us, feed us, punish us, worry us, and cry for us, but do we ever really know them? In The Persimmon Tree Carol Shelby Stephenson uses his own voice to write about his father in a long poem which is divided into 21 numbered sections . In the poem the speaker asks questions about his parents, mainly his father, then answers them with intricate images. Stephenson grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina; therefore, most of his images are farm-related. His father was a farmer, a butcher of hogs, a hunter of fox, possum, and rabbit, a fisherman, a man who only once or twice had too much to drink, and who claimed to have been a faithful husband. Stephenson wants to know more, and he asks questions . In describing his father, the speaker looks often to the most obvious source— his mother, his father's wife. In the stream-of-consciousness section II the speaker asks: and when I rely on his words and my memory will the past be one couple's romp through the years of working fields together did he ever cheat on her and later in III he says, "I wish I could have been there when they courted." Stephenson begins his poem by describing his parents before the speaker was born: She is five-feet-two. He said she was as plump as a partridge. Said she could sit on the crook of his right arm Which he held out like a perch. In IX he asks, "How personal can I be?" and in a strongly sensual prose description of his parents setting tobacco he becomes a voyeur: 71 . . . you walked with the hand-planter, its belly filled with water. She wore a loose blouse and a burlap sack which held the plants .... . . . she walked backwards, half poking, tossing the plants into the planter's mouth as you clicked the trigger. Water gushed. The tobacco blossoms, sticky, bobbing still Through the waving heat. What is most impressive about Stephenson's long poem is its range of style, tone, and consciousness, and the weaving of lyricism, imagery, and narrative to produce a whole tapestry. This interlacing of prose and poetry blends memory, wonder, and a desperate longing to realize a man apart from his relationship to the surface world. The father in Stephenson's poem "never budged from his assurance," but when that inflexibility is checked the speaker remembers how his father swore he'd never have an indoor bathroom bcause it...