Since Jared Carter's poetry collection, Work, for the Night is Coming, won the 1980 Walt Whitman Award, he has been recognized as one of the nation's major poets. This is his fourth collection of poems. He continues to tell us about a place called Mississinewa County. His poems reach out to the stories, myths, and recollections of an entire continent.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Story, Not the Teller,
This review is from: Cross This Bridge at a Walk (Paperback)
In a recent interview, Bob Dylan, commenting on his early days playing the coffee houses in Greenwich Village, said a lot of the folk singers used the songs to project themselves, their own personalities, onto the audience. Dylan didn't approve or condemn that approach, he just distinguished it from his own, which was to focus on the nature of the song itself. I'm paraphrasing from memory here, but it is Dylan's idea that I am getting at - that it is the song that matters, more than the singer. Many folksingers used the songs as a mode of self-expression; the songs were used to delve the personality of the singer. Dylan preferred the opposite tack: to use his personal style to probe the character, history and resonances of the song itself. This is probably why Dylan, the true protean artist, never sounded like the same performer from decade to decade, or even from year to year, as opposed to someone like, say, Neil Diamond who, for all his strengths, seems to be singing the same song from one decade to the next.
This is all a round-about way of discussing the new book of poems by Jared Carter, `Cross This Bridge at a Walk'. In the same way that, with Dylan, the emphasis is all on the songs; with Carter the emphasis is wholly on the stories themselves. As with Dylan, who places all his mastery of technique and tradition at the service of the individual song, who never uses a song simply to showcase his ability, or his personality, Carter subordinates his considerable mastery of formal technique and literary tradition to the stories themselves. Immediately, as you begin to read this book, the stories, and the characters they contain, press themselves on your attention, and it is very easy to read a considerable distance into the book before realizing how all the poems, whether strictly or loosely, are erected on the foundation of the iambic pentameter line, or fall into regular stanzas, or even, in one instance, form a sequence of sonnets. This, of course, is only as it should be. The mark of a master is to make his craft appear effortless, unconsidered, and entirely natural. Which brings me to another aspect of Carter's poetry worth noting: his voice. Like his formal technique, it is unobtrusive, and subordinated to the voice of his characters, of his narrator, and to the natural speech appropriate to the time and place of his stories. Once again, nothing detracts from his characters, and their particular stories. Carter is a quiet master, steeped in the millenia-old conventions of the storyteller's art, an immersion, without which, mastery is impossible. You don't notice Carter's technique, or his `voice', or his personality; what you notice, and remember, are his characters, and their stories. Finally, there is the matter of Carter's `regionality'- apparently a term of ridicule in some quarters. There is perhaps a tendency among younger readers (and not a few professors), to confuse regionality with provinciality. Both qualities arise from being `rooted', of having a long history in a particular region. One result of being deeply rooted in a region can be to remain naive, or to become narrow in one's outlook. But another result of rootedness can be to arrive at an understanding of one's immediate world so thorough, and so true, as to transcend locality altogether. It can be credibly argued, (and often is), that genuine universality can be obtained in no other way, except through a lifelong familiarity with one's own native region. (Certainly a consideration of such acknowledged masters as Faulkner, Hardy, or the Brontes, and many, many others, would bear this out). As a poet, as a storyteller - indeed, as a man, Carter is who he is, without apology. He is old enough to be able to look back over a lifetime of experience, and to see clearly what is dross and what is gold - what is worth his time as an artist, and worth ours as readers. As regards questions of form, technique, voice and any other of a hundred literary issues, he is beyond them. He is a master of the long, relaxed, and replete sentence, as natural as casual talk or idle thought, flowing easily through literary forms of every stripe, like a stream through a rocky landscape. If you are the sort of reader who opens a book with a serious purpose, and expect a serious return for your time and attention, give Carter a serious hour, or several. He is one writer who deserves it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Mississinewa Mythos,
By
This review is from: Cross This Bridge at a Walk (Paperback)
"To go, if there is time, to look at what
the land holds..." So begins "Raccoon Grove", the first narrative poem in Carter's newest collection of poetry. Decidedly Hoosier, the stories are lean, honest, and reflect the tellurian watershed of the silent Mississinewa River -- a river as enigmatic as the towns and people that lay within its valley. While Twain's Mississippi embodied freedom, Carter's Mississinewa is a twilit messenger, an ancient witness to all things buried, drowned, and nearly forgotten. Past the glass factories, the paper mills, the gas wells and the sycamores, the river winds through five counties of the Indiana heartland. It is here, in this area, that Carter's mythical Mississinewa County lies. It is here where musselmen know "ebony shell from monkeyface, and why you never forked pimplebacks"; of tent revivals, midwestern thunderstorms, and preachers who discover miracles of a different sort; of young women creeping up the darkened stairs of the local photographer, a loner who indeed knows the difference between "art" and the hidden ambience of spirit; and of a rebel captain, a covered bridge, a Hoosier militiaman, and a handful of matches... Born and raised in the Indiana town of Elwood, educated at Yale and Goddard, Carter has recreated the midwest as only a true Hoosier can. Behind his tales rise the shadows of Tecumseh, the Delaware and Miami, the frontier forts, and the people who came after to flood the land with change. The mark of their desires and tragedies live on, much as the Mississinewa dam still remains as both scar and savior. It is Carter's voice that demands we neither seek nor expect explanation from what we see here in this mystical landscape -- merely the acceptance of a real and ancient truth.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Back to Indiana,
This review is from: Cross This Bridge at a Walk (Paperback)
These long poems set in Indiana leave one with a sense of wonder. They tell stories about places and link us to the people who walked those places in past times. Lovers of history, Hoosiers and ex-Hoosiers will especially feel at home with Jeb Carter.
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