Customer Reviews

Cheyenne Line

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J.V. Brummels is a family man who raises cattle and horses on a ranch, teaches English and Creative Writing at Wayne State University, and somehow finds time to write poetry and novels. Every aspect of his life can be found in Cheyenne Line. These are the keen-eyed observations of an educated man who has also been sanded down by prairie winds. His words are full of heart and marrow, crafted so plainly that you won't have to wonder at their meaning.

"Golden" holds the essence of his genesis.
Mama was a beauty - still is.
And Daddy was a G.I. Joe,
a dog face so country-fried
they called him Broomcorn,
the only nickname he ever earned.

"Plain" sets forth the author's past, present, and future sense of place.
We prosper and we fail.
Sun and rain.
Hail and hoppers
and drought and flood.
Good years we fatten
on the produce of our fields.
Bad years, we cast
our wind-burned sight
down lines scratched
in the dirt....

I was surprised by what I found in Brummel's poems. "Krei" was his touching tribute to a childhood teacher and what it meant to be an educator in the past. Life's truths were discovered and shared while playing cards and mendng fences. "Running with Dogs" and "Teaching the Dawn" revealed a man and his solitary musings. Humor and honor, doing one's best, questioning life, all played a part. I saved my favorite for last. "Dead Men's Fences".
For all my children's lives I've built a herd,
and no one builds without taking, from an Indian
or some other stranger, at best from some ghost
who can only wander his land as a shade,
his herd and tribe dispersed. It seems
all my life I've mended dead men's fences.

J.V. Brummels takes the measure of himself as man and poet in few words, skillfully.

J.V. Brummels is called a "cowboy poet," and that may not be unfair. He writes about working the land, riding herd, small towns, and his love of Nebraska ranchland. But he avoids many cowverse stereotypes. He uses vernacular free verse, eschewing sentimental rhymes and too-cute quatrains. He uses snappy imagery and smart, vernacular idioms. Yet somehow, there's something about this book that leaves me cold.

Cowverse is a very conformist community, and Brummels boldly ducks its most derivative shortcomings. When he writes about playing cards on a winter midnight in the bunkhouse, or buying tack in a dying prairie town, he's not glorifying himself or his world. I get the sense that he knows the world he describes is disappearing. He neither mourns nor exalts, he simply describes his world as it is.

Based solely on his imagery, Brummels may be one of the most forthright, powerful, incisive poets to come out of Nebraska. But imagery is only half of poetry. His language is very functional. Reading his work, I get the feeling that he sees words entirely as units of meaning, not as units of sound. The result is poetry that feels very prose-like. Consider this representative sample, from "Letter to New York," page 27:

Those big storms on the news brought you to mind.
The weather on the wide side of the Big River
is seldom reported, except locally, and here
it's hardly news. All last summer we flirted
with record highs set in the dirtiest years
of the thirties without breaking a single one.

If I read this work in a workshop setting, I'd tell Brummels to avoid dense concentrations of small function words like "is," "and," and "the." I'd tell him that phrases like "the wide side of the Big River" are too cute and clichéd, like refugees from a country-and-western B-side. I'd tell him that punctuation should be kept to a minimum so the language, not the writer, determines the form of the verse. I could go on, but you get my point.

Brummels constructs moving, insightful images, and leads the reader from examinations of the everyday, up through layers of metaphysical meaning, and back to the world, but trailing clouds of cowverse glory. In terms of meaning, I really like what he does with words. But in terms of the potential of language, he falls short, and the pieces read like short personal essays chopped into lines, almost at random.

So perhaps we can call Brummels a mixed bag. Some people may place more weight on meaning, and will like these poems more than me. But those of us who see poetry as a confluence of meaning and music are likely to be disappointed.