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3.0 out of 5 stars
Intelligent, perceptive, talented R.H.W. Dillard, December 28, 2001
This review is from: Sallies: Poems (Hardcover)
Review of R.H.W. Dillard's Sallies, a collection of his poems
Sally n.; pl. -lies.
A rushing or bursting forth; a brief outbreak into activity, an excursion, esp. one away from the usual track, a flight of fancy, liveliness or wit, a flashing forth of a quick and active mind, a brilliantly spoken or written passage, a bold violation of custom.
Richard Dillard, Roanoke-born scholar, takes us on a poetic excursion. We sally into his poetic expression on the edge of propriety; there are no really bad words.
His body of work in Sallies is varied: long and short, rhymed and unrhymed, serious and comical. It's fun to read.
With a doctorate in English and professor of English at Hollins University in Roanoke, Dillard surprises with perceptive poetic imagery and then shocks with a big poem on flatulence.
Imagery: "The silhouette of a songbird / Sways on the tip of a cedar, / Transfers to a nearby hemlock, / Flutters and pivots on the highest slender / Limb, a fragment of evening song, / Then gone."
Flatulence: "O my bran-eating healthy ones, / My windy-bummed buglers, oat-eaters, / Husk-crunchers, settling back after the evening's meal, / Awaiting... / Explosions that float the buttocks."
He pokes fun at a dim-witted colleague: "Even the devil had one good idea. / Hitler had the autobahn, / Stalin, the central Asian dams, / So, I suppose even a fool / like you must know something true, / One thing almost valid, / But, quite seriously, I doubt it."
Explores aging, life and death, loneliness:
"The mysteries of summer, / Great mystery of time, shadows / Soon to lengthen even at noon, / While earlier today a crow / Punching at the meaty side / Of the rabbit in the road / Cast none at all, the sun dead overhead, / nights will spread, days fade, / But summer still begins, the heat, / Height of the year. / We seek solace from time... / The rabbit's ghost shimmers on the new-mown lawn, / Then breaks away, a jagged line, / Four crows huddle in a dark clump / As a distant train groans / And shifts its load of coal, / Drones on to tomorrow's early dawn."
In Black Dog Dillard likens deep depression bordering on death, much as Churchill did, as a black dog, "The mood that swells like a gray cloud / Even on a bright morning, / Or on a gray morning covers the day / Like a musty blanket, one stored too long / In a cellar cabinet or damp case in the attic."
The shortest entry is one sentence, 10 syllables, 13 if you count the title.
"Without You Each day grows old, no minute ever new."
The longest poems, hardly worth tromping through, were created when Dillard was asked to write several critical essays on the works of several other authors. "I avoided the agony of writing critical prose by writing in verse and allowing the muse to do the heavy lifting," he writes in the endnotes.
For the most part, the three essays are too heavy for the light reader, appealing most likely only to other writers.
He should have followed Ciardi's dictum even as he quoted it in Fred Chappell's Poetry: Paradox and Tension.
"It seems that more often year by year / I ignore (poet John) Ciardi's dictum / 'Not to send a poem on a prose errand."'
The third essay in verse, Anthropophagi is a bit more fun as he tells critics to get their tucked heads out of their vests, their buried heads out of their chests and
read the books, not just the books about the books, "read Poe, / Actually read him, read Twain, read Robinson, / Read the women and the men... / Read everything from Shakespeare to Stapledon, / And read them well, not just to fit a template / Or make a point dozens have already made."
Some of his poems have recognizable forms - as does How You Saved My Life: A Letter, written in 20 stanzas of three lines each, the last word of each third line rhyming with the last word in the first line of the stanza to follow, thus:
"Since you asked, it wasn't swift heroics,
A leap in front of a moving train
Or a fireman's carry from a burning tower.
It didn't happen in a minute, even an hour,"
And this:
"By chance (or some higher plan) someone arrives
Just when we need them, shows us the way
From the window's ledge or to the open door,
Helps us to find ourselves...and more.
So that's the story, Sallie, all there is.
I send it with my love and thanks. OXOX"
Dillard has written five other poetry collections, most recently Just Here, Just Now, 1994; two novels, a story collection, two critical studies and verse translations of plays by Plautus and Aristophanes.
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