Frank OrmsbyThe Rain Barrel

Abstract

propaganda minister; and Rudolph Hess, who landed a plane in Scotland in a futile attempt to negotiate a peace in 1941. One appreciates Larson’s attention to the morale of the English people undergoing repeated attacks in the cities. Clementine Churchill became quite concerned with conditions in the shelters, where many chose to sleep when there was a “bombers’ moon.” Finally, there is the Great Man himself, never quite stepping off his mythic pedestal, uplifting the populace with regular tours of bombed areas, speaking by radio to the nation. The reader also sees a man in his moods, as war news comes in, a man with appetites for eating, drinking, smoking, and talking till the wee hours of the morning. Reading of Churchill’s and England’s trials during 1940 and 1941, month by month, one becomes quite unsympathetic with America’s sitting out for so long. It should have been clear to F. D. Roosevelt and the American public that England suffered immensely and would not be able to withstand a full-scale invasion. Why did it take Pearl Harbor to bring the US into the war? One wants to know more about public sentiment for staying out, the resistance even toward the Lend-Lease program, Roosevelt ’s excessive caution. Had the failure of the League of Nations, the Depression, the Dust Bowl so turned our concerns inward? Did we feel secure because an ocean separated us from Europe? Can we expect another book? W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Kemal Varol Wȗf Trans. Dayla Rogers. Austin, Texas. Center for Middle Eastern Studies. 2020. 193 pages. KEMAL VAROL IS little known outside Turkey, where he is a minor star of contemporary literature. He is best known for the 2014 novel Haw, translated into English under the title Wȗf as part of the University of Texas’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies’ (CMES) book series Emerging Voices from the Middle East. In Turkey, the novel was awarded multiple prizes, including a journalism association’s peace prize, and was translated thanks to a prestigious PEN/Heim grant. The sixth book in the CMES series, Wȗf is the rare literary work from Turkey made available into English and proves its author to be as strong an emerging talent as Elif Shafak or Orhan Pamuk were upon their anglophone debuts. Books in Review Frank Ormsby The Rain Barrel Winston Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2020. 112 pages. KEEN OBSERVATIONS ARE expected of a poet, and Irish poet Frank Ormsby satisfies many times over in The Rain Barrel. The book is filled with bright idylls such as “The Beekeeper” and “Small Things.” In “Small Things,” a pair of “old boys” try to cheer the speaker because he’s just missed seeing a heron: “They cast about for fitting consolation. / ‘Have you seen the egrets?’” they ask. But the speaker’s not disappointed: he finds “three pleasures” in their joy from “the small things made precious by their delight.” Each of these poems is a pretty figure in its own right, like pieces of beach glass, but The Rain Barrel is much more than a string of pretty baubles. There are poems of playful personification, such as “Scarecrow,” in which Ormsby imagines the family’s scarecrow pining for a “ragdoll / who won a prize for lady of the house” and who “lives in a cornfield further west.” As these character/objects multiply and reoccur throughout The Rain Barrel, they begin to weave a complex tapestry of a place and a family. Ormsby demonstrates a subtle virtuosity in this book. There are many variations and departures from the quiet, reflective poems. The poem “Small World (4)” is a series of ten brief and independent stanzas. Each of them is a highly compressed combination of observation and sentiment. If one isn’t fussy about counting syllables, they are excellent examples of the haiku form. Or, for a different form, consider “The Love Poem,” which begins by announcing “the love poem has been discredited / . . . a day has been set aside for the shredding of the English love sonnet.” However, by the end of the piece, the love poem has been restored—“my prohibition...