Book Review: Local News from Someplace Else

Abstract

Local News from Someplace Else. By Maijorie Maddox. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2013. xii + 92 pp. $14.00 (paper).It is now a commonplace that modem poets tend to embrace, well, commonplace. They don't compose epics about journeys to underworld; they don't rhyme about major historical battles; they avoid supernatural tales. They instead write insightful poems about simple things or everyday objects. Spiral notebooks. Ferns. Wheelbarrows. These are a few of their favorite things.The virtue of this interest in everyday is that it helps us recognize value and significance of things we otherwise take for granted. From a religious perspective, this technique reminds us of God's place in quotidian. But sometimes such poems can make reader yearn for a bigger subject, one with a broader significance and stronger emotional impact.Marjorie Maddox's fourth book of poetry, Local News from Someplace Else, gives us poems about commonplace that also satisfy this desire for something more. On one hand, she writes about events that most of us have never been through: terrorist attacks, deadly storms, armed robberies, plane crashes, school shootings, kidnappings, unsolved deaths, murdered children, hunting accidents, cancer. But these are events that we hear about all too often, if not every day, and Maddox explores how we try to understand pain in distant places.Maddox, a professor of English at Lock Haven University, recognizes that her subjects carry an inherent emotional weight and so avoids melodrama and hyperbole. She uses subtlety and restraint when imagining thoughts of those directly involved with tragedy. Good Mother Hides from Photographers (p. 14) uses metaphors of photography to depict a mothers grief and shame when her daughter commits a crime; Pennsylvania September: The Witnesses, (p. 17) uses distinct voices of three different people to recall crash of United flight 93.Other poems take a more personal (but never solipsistic) approach by meditating on effects that terrible events have on distant observers. In Reoccurring Storms (p. 59), Maddox recounts several weather-related tragedies, including a deadly tornado in Oklahoma from which a family hid in a bathtub. Two boys were killed; father, daughter, and pregnant mother survived. Maddox's moving final stanzas lead us into mind of daughter before casting us back into the ordinary:And in Oklahoma, five-year-old Cathleen,who, amidst hurricane's howl,recognized hope in heartbeatof her unborn sibling:that faint hum in ear;or that sudden surge toward possibilityinto what one day even you and I-after a particularly hard day of ordinary-might discuss as casuallyas weather, as someone else's life. …