Wild Peavines (review)

Abstract

Morgan, Robert. Wild Peavines. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1996. Selected poems. 32 pages. Paperback $10.00. Limited edition $35.00. Wild Peavines, a handsomely designed and produced chapbook of nineteen poems from Gnomon Press, represents Robert Morgan at his best. Readers familiar with his writing—and who shouldn't be, after a steady outpouring of significant work including nine collections of poetry, two novels, two short story collections, and a book of essays—will recognize some long-standing concerns and themes. Often the landscape he observes is a text to be read, a language to be learned and examined, a lost time to be recovered. Something seemingly as insignificant as chicken scratches in the yard becomes a clue to the ever enduring mystery of the natural world, a place if examined closely enough may "seem some/ funny ogham fading its script/ of quest..." The discoveries, then, are to be made by attention to overlooked details, sometimes "too fine for bigger eyes to catch/ among the chalks and gritty signs,/ the incunabula of morning." And often the overlooked details of the past, as in the story of Little Carpenter ("Attakullakulla Goes to London"), reveal a conflict in this Native American between a longing to be back at home in a honey-rich and varied natural world and being caught in the dry and chalky "white" world of English society. In these poems the recovery of history is the recovery of language, a renewal, an awakening that opens into larger mysteries, or as Morgan puts it, "family letters are like windows/ to the decades, wars. To find those/ in a loft or closet is to rush/ into a turret and relish/ the view to another turret/ where a great-great grandma will write/ to her mother...." What we relish in these poems is the view that takes us inside, the language vibrant and alert without being forced. Morgan is a true master in this collection, a poet who, like Old Tony in/ "Companions" works "alert to every/ nuance ofvoice and line, turning without overstepping...." These poems recover for us not only the forgotten and overlooked but also the terrain of memory and emotion, deepening our connections to both then and now. The world outside is the way inside, if we but read the signs, follow the traces, understand the language, for the mystery is, as we learn in Wild Peavines, like some word from a lost archaeology of the Appalachians, an uncovering of the multilayered world of the past as a way of examining and connecting to the present. -Jeff Daniel Marion 61 ...