Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem

Abstract

Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem. By Peter Neil Carroll (Higganum, CT.: Higganum Hill Books, 2008. Pp. 73. Illustrations. Paper, $12.95). The signage along the state highway identifies a Great River Road that is supposed to run parallel to the Mississippi, but anyone traveling down such a road knows how frustrating it can be to catch a glimpse of that famous body of Spied from the top of a hill, or implied by a road sign to a village, or assumed to be alongside a deep valley, the Mississippi remains an elusive presence. But as historian Peter Neil Carroll demonstrates in the poetic travelogue he has produced, that may be appropriate because the Mississippi is never simply a river. If it functions geographically as an outlet for other streams and rivers, it is also a chain of swampland and wildlife reserves interrupted by levees of varying complexity, and a federally funded waterway for commercial traffic that provides massive locks and dams operated 24/7 at taxpayer expense, and a drainage system for collecting toxic runoff from pesticides on farmlands producing grain subsidized by government policy, and a source of drinking water for dozens of cities and towns and villages, and a memory bank that inflects our history and literature with a politics and a culture. This elusive Mississippi is sketched as an ambiguous, provocative presence in a sequence of poems that records Carroll's journey with a friend (also a historian) as they travel southward from Minneapolis in the spring and summer of 2005, reliving a similar road trip the took together over thirty years earlier. Requiem is the right subtitle: a requiem is a form without precise technical rules that embodies a personal act of mourning. Yet a requiem differs from the mourning of the traditional elegy that laments, praises, and consoles. Carroll is too open-eyed, too ironic and critical to write elegiacally. His book is a song for the dead voiced in a funeral procession-as much dirge as requiem. As he writes, he follows the in its southward-moving procession that also takes up the dead, the dying, and the ills of America. Most disturbingly the longer Carroll spends by the river, the darker his vision becomes. Though he and his fellow-historian anticipate a joyous revival once they arrive in New Orleans, the travelers instead find all their apprehensions confirmed, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, whose coincidental arrival is entirely fitting. The resulting lack of closure is more than an inconvenient interruption. It is a prospect that evokes the mortality of the travelers even as it is stained dark with the sense of a national prophecy. Initially, at the journey's outset, all goes well. Of course April in the Midwest, when the travel from Minneapolis to St Louis by auto over several days, is not the same as August in the Southland, when they resume their trip. This first phase is almost buoyant, with side excursions to adjacent towns (Galena), straightforward conversation about plans for the future, memories of lovers, and family days with children. The sites by the are also steeped in domestic events and local lore. Poems open onto places dominated by the history that still abounds: brick buildings in Trempeleau, Wisconsin, prompt Carroll to remember his grandfather's work as a glazier; Guttenburg, Iowa, offers a running river that speaks in signs, spills a low wave / to shore, startles a bare-armed mother spoonfeeding / her baby on the grass; and despite the commercialism of Hannibal, Missouri (the whole town's rehabilitated, restored, / whitewashed, gentrified, falsified), Carroll stands on a dock to imagine boys craving adventure, and Mark Twain as a white-haired man returning- a vision that generously includes Carroll and his friend: two old men come to dream across the mile-wide water. Briefly, these idyllic moments are threatened. Carroll begins noting the increasingly truculent roadside markers that restrict, warn, and ultimately threaten its addressees. …