Sunday, January 24, 2010

By Reviewed by Peter Schmitt

"Holding Everything Down: Poems by William Notter"

Southern Illinois University Press, $14.95

In "The Dead Guy and the Evangelist," from William Notter's first collection of poems, "Holding Everything Down," the speaker claims, "I don't need to imagine more of a heaven/than the light inside of Five Springs Canyon/afternoons when cutthroats pop the surface/and bite anything you throw in the water..."

But the speaker isn't the evangelist -- it's the dead guy, so called because his job is picking up dead cows and trucking them to a rendering plant. It's work "not many people would do," he says with understatement, but it typifies the surprise, and terrain, of this engaging book.

Also characteristic is how Notter's personae manage to find transcendence, heaven if you will, beyond the hard circumstances of their lives, like the construction worker in "Morning Break, Barksdale Job," who, when he isn't daydreaming about women, knows how "a man can make it to five/thinking about the woods,/the big buck prize at the bait shop,/or maybe a run to them casino boats,/free beers and a chance to make it big."

These poems are deeply American in their sources, and Notter is a laureate -- maybe the laureate -- of the High Plains and western states, of rodeos and cottonwoods, of big skies and "more space/than anyone can stand until he leaves."

With vivid clarity, in "High Plains Farming" he describes driving right into a storm front: "The light turns spooky, dust/just hangs, grass glows like it's ready/to spark and catch on fire."

But as firmly rooted in landscapes as his work is, Notter is every bit as alert to the men and women who inhabit these vast open spaces. Several of his characters have known addictions, are in denial or recovery, like the "skittish Navajo woman" who may be just back "from a stay in detox" ("Breakfast at the Road Runner Café"). The speaker would reach out to her, but his words are swallowed by trucks on the interstate and the Santa Fe's engines "thrumming west."

Violence, or its threat, is never far from the surface. In "Parchman Farm," prison inmates, boarding buses on release, are handed bibles: "And at the next stop toward Memphis/you can find bibles by the busload." Notter is adept at the swift, telling observation, as in "Accused," a brief portrait of an apparent murderer ("We want to be able to say he looks evil") or in "Slow Progress on Chicasaw Ridge," where racism in Mississippi is recalled by a black co-worker.

If the poems are any indication, Notter has held some memorable jobs in his 38 years, but even if he hasn't, his depictions are convincing. His resumé includes park ranger, tire repairman, construction worker and, of course, "dead guy." He also teaches writing, but it is the years of manual, outdoor labor that most inform his work.

And it's the work of a young man whose first love is a car called the "Great Black Shark," who in "Jubilee" offers a wonderful paean in the manner of Christopher Smart: "Now I will consider my purple Plymouth Duster." Later, love of women will mean, naturally, breakup and heartache ("Roadside Motel," "Greatest of These is Fire"), but also, as in "Half-Rack at the Rendezvous," an exultation almost delirious: "All the trees were throwing fireworks/of blossom ... it was those ribs that started everything."

Notter writes almost exclusively in a lean free verse, but just before the end pulls out a sestina -- a challenging repeating form -- and a compelling one, imagining possible fates for a young woman on a missing person's flyer. "Have You Seen Anna?" becomes, ultimately, both elegy and love poem, as do many of his evocations of the American West.

In this accomplished debut, William Notter's finds his place among our essential native voices.

Peter Schmitt has published five books of poems, including "Renewing the Vows."