The poet and novelist Ron Rash has said that “writing poetry and fiction are like AM/FM. They’re on a completely different frequency.” He says that poetry “for me is more intuitive. A story is not: a story is something you have to articulate.” This distinction between the creative processes does not necessarily apply to the creative products; different frequencies often carry the same signals. In his preface to Rash’s second book of verse, published in 2000, Anthony Hecht called the work “not so much a collection of poems as something with the coherence of a perfectly composed novella—a long account by, say, Chekhov or Faulkner, Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor.” It isn’t that the collection has a plot, “but there is emphatically a pervading and presiding atmosphere.”
Hecht could not have foreseen that, in eight years, with the publication of Serena, Rash would become a best-selling novelist and one of the country’s most acclaimed fiction writers. Yet even as Rash has devoted himself primarily to short stories and novels, his poetic skill emerges in the beauty and rhythm of his prose. Last year’s Above the Waterfall inspired reviews that were the mirror image of Hecht’s response: As Karen Brady explained in her review, the book is “less novel than tone poem.”
This welcome collection of previously collected and new poems is a promising opportunity to introduce Rash’s verse to the wide audience he’s won with his fiction. Whereas his previous four collections were published by small regional presses, Poems: New and Selected is published by Ecco, the HarperCollins imprint behind his novels and short stories. Even the cover seems like a self-conscious attempt to establish the significance of Rash’s work, its bold colors and fonts mimicking classic Faber & Faber collections.
Although it’s unlikely that this collection will be read as widely as his novels, lovers of his fiction (or of good poetry) will find much to enjoy. The Appalachian settings and characters, the sharp language and crisp images that are the hallmarks of his fiction are all here, in poems about historical figures like the naturalists William Bartram and Horace Kephart (who is also a character in Serena); Civil War conflicts and clan feuds; the origins of place and plant names; and exile—from ancestral countries, from family farms, from the mountains. Some of the overlap with his fiction is more direct: One of the new poems, “First Memory,” makes a cameo appearance in the diary of a main character from Above the Waterfall. (That character, like Rash, is an admirer of Gerard Manley Hopkins.) “Carolina Parakeet” covers subject matter integral to his novel The Cove. “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out” is a poetic version of a short story with the same title.
Rash’s poems also wield a strong narrative pull—both in the stories of individual poems and across different poems sharing themes and subjects. This is particularly true of Rash’s first three collections. (He has published just one collection since 2002, and there are only eight previously uncollected poems here.) Many poems from Raising the Dead concern a town flooded with the construction of a new dam. “Analepsis” tells of a cry rising from the lake’s depths, which people claim to be the ghost of a dead child whose body was not reinterred before the flood and now gives voice to the underneath / of water, the lost unnamed / dawn-calmed by the dam’s pale hand. Others in the same collection concern the life and death of the poet’s cousin. “Watauga County: 1974” beautifully expresses the emotional flux of serving as his kin’s pallbearer: the right hand / I feared might not raise him now / not wanting to let him down. Eureka Mill, his first collection, revolves around an Appalachian mill town during the Depression: the difficult choice of leaving struggling family farms for more reliable jobs away from ancestral land; the dangerous working conditions; the failed attempts to organize strikes. It is the most novelistic of the collections and probably the most emotionally compelling.
Rash’s ancestors arrived in the southern Appalachian mountains from Wales in the mid-18th century, and his poetry often mines this family history. “The Exchange” tells the story of a man who proposed to his wife after glimpsing her on a trail and knows right then the woman / she will be, bold enough match / for a man rash as his name. “Genealogy,” too, plays on his name, imagining his kin’s migration from Wales to Appalachia: Perhaps / some racial memory held them there— / an isolate people, a name carried far / only in the wind’s harsh sibilance, / its branch-lashing rattle and rush. A link is posited between the British Isles and the mountains in “Reading the Leaves,” with the tobacco leaves hanging from barn rafters like brittle pages / . . . strung together as Celts once / strung leaves on cords to compose / the first words of Albion. (The surprising likenesses between the art of the past and the work of the present might be an intentional inversion of Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” in which the speaker proudly associates the work of poetry with the manual labor of his father and grandfather.)
Pointing out the similarities between Rash’s poetry and fiction may give the false impression that his poems are only prose on stilts, stories chopped up into lines to give the semblance of verse. Although Rash is never mentioned in discussions of the New Formalist poets, who have revived interest in traditional verse forms, he often adapts poetic traditions in provocative ways. He begins Eureka Mill with a classic invocation to the muse and in “Last Interview” pays homage to “My Last Duchess,” Browning’s dramatic monologue: “That’s an early portrait on the wall,” the rich mill owner tells a reporter as he attempts to explain the difference between noblesse oblige and exploitation. “The Sweeper” recasts Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” into the perspective of a child mill worker. The echo across the century and ocean is striking:
Dad shaved my head the lint was so bad,
but I didn’t cry because he said
I was the oldest child and so
must grow up faster than I’d hoped.
Rash’s most impressive formal achievement is his synthesis of an obscure Welsh form called awdl gywydd with the very familiar English blank verse. Awdl gywydd consists of four-line stanzas, seven syllables per line, and alternating end and internal rhymes. Rash’s hybrid uses the seven-syllable, irregularly accented line of awdl gywydd, but approaches blank verse by discarding most rhyme and all stanza breaks. These poems frequently consist of two or three sentences over 20-30 lines, and most of the lines are enjambed—that is, they do not end with punctuation. This technique creates an extraordinarily quick rhythm.
“The Reaping,” a characteristically moving narrative of death, is a powerful example of Rash’s innovative form. A father hears the hay baler that his son had been operating and knows / what keeps his son in the fields / gathering darkness. Having established the suspense (one of his favorite narrative techniques is nonchalantly mentioning a secret to be explained later), Rash deftly unfolds the father’s disappointments with his careless child: The man walks through barbed wire strung in April, / already sagged by fence posts / leaned like cornstalks after hail / because the boy would not / listen, would always search for shortcuts. He eventually finds what surprises the reader, but not him, and the title’s double-meaning becomes clear:
Each shortcut
Leading to this evening when
His father smells blood sizzling
On the metal and as he
Frees an arm from the roller
Chides his son for half a life
Lost to save half a minute,
Before kissing the cold brow,
Forgiving what the reaper cannot.
The consistently fast pace of the lines, which rarely include internal pauses, and tight narrative tension make it tempting to speed through the poem. The reader must exert willpower to hang on to the narrative saddle, to clutch the powerful images and sounds: the pitiful juxtaposition of the father’s tenderness and resignation; the gruesome, powerful synesthesia of the blood’s smell and sound; the haunting last lines that echo beyond the reading, like the lingering notes of a cathedral organ.
Christopher J. Scalia is a writer in Washington.
