Satisfied with Havoc (Autumn House Poetry) [Paperback]

Jo McDougall (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

...In mundane occurrences, McDougall finds vast hungers and driving compulsions. Her poems repay reading, rereading, and rereading. --Booklist

Spareness of language. Excruciating honesty. Subtlety of spirit. Forgiveness. These are the qualities that constitute Jo McDougall's poetry. --Gerald Stern

About the Author

Jo McDougall grew up on a rice farm in the Arkansas Delta. The author of five books of poetry, she has taught at various universities in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Kansas. She has received a John Ciardi Fellowhsip, four fellowships to the McDowell Colony, and awards from the Dewitt Wallace/ Reader's Digest Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. The 2000 winner of Arkansas' Porter Prize, she lives in Little Rock.

Product Details

• Paperback: 71 pages
• Publisher: Autumn House Press (April 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0966941993
• ISBN-13: 978-0966941999
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #598,228 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Joy To Read, October 2, 2004

By 

Charles M. Nobles (Tulsa, OK United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Satisfied with Havoc (Autumn House Poetry) (Paperback)

It has been said of McDougall that her work "...gives voice to the ineffable emotions of plain people." No less a poet than Gerald Stern has noted her poetry is "Excruciating honest" and has the qualities of "Subtlety of spirit. Forgiveness" that, taken together, make it "A joy to read."

This is her best work and lives up to both the critics and readers expectations. It will appeal to avid poetry fans as well as readers that typically tend to not be big poetry fans but like plain, down-to-earth, heart felt passages about everyday occurrences and events that comprise life. In other words, poetry that is succinct, relevant to everyday life, and a pleasure to read.
For example, her poem titled "To My Daughter, Who Refuses To Meet Me Halfway," McDougall writes of the heartbreak associated with the death of her daughter:

"Dating our lives from their departures,
We beg them for signs.
We want to stumble upon them napping
or peeling an orange.
They send nothing, no nearer to us now
Than the day they nodded to Death
And asked him in."

Thus, in 41 words and 7 lines she is able to speak the truth for anyone who has ever lost a loved one. Ther is more to the poem but these lines are illustrative of the power and insight of her work.
She also writes of hope, growing old, living in Kansas, (61 poems in all) and a wonderful poem titled Snow In Arkansas that reminds me of the havoc snow sometimes plays on Oklahoma.
These poems describe real things in a beautiful, readable, magical manner and will make you understand why she is "A joy to read."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Book!, May 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Satisfied with Havoc (Autumn House Poetry) (Paperback)

It is appropriate that Jo McDougall's poems have been adapted a number of times for stage and television, as well as being read on the radio by Garrison Keillor. Not since Spoon River Anthology has small town life been so perfectly captured in poetry. McDougall lets her characters speak for themselves, revealing their griefs, passions, and triumphs in their strong Arkansas twang. McDougall switches easily from epigrams to sonnets to elegies, letting whole lives be revealed in short poems. This is an amazing book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Poet in America, May 20, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Satisfied with Havoc (Autumn House Poetry) (Paperback)

The poetry of Jo McDougall is simple, yet vast. Her spare and subtle language weaves a series of poems that explore themes of grief and loss, longing and memory, and flow from images of childhood through old age. These poems find depth in their silence as much as their speech, being born often of situations and images which tend to demand a certain stillness unto themselves, such as burying a daughter, or the sudden, snapshot-like recollection of a childhood memory. McDougall's poetry remains honest to the stillness and silence of these moments, never failing to acknowledge the precarious territory that it explores between poetic description and those things the true significance of which words can often fail to portray. "As the coffin lid closes / over the body..." she writes in Dirt, in a poem entitled Metaphor,

...the silence
is sometimes described as noise.
it is not.
it is silence... (11)

By breaking down this metaphor and turning it on its back, McDougall exposes the ineffable underbelly of this scene. Paradoxically, we are brought to understand that the silence here should not be thought of as a "loud" silence; rather, it is the very wordlessness itself - the silence of the silence - that gives the situation its power.
Both Dirt and McDougall's latest book, Satisfied With Havoc, are comprehensive and approachable in style, the ordinary, yet crisp language lending a lucidity and a clarity of focus to the poems. In this quiet, understated voice, even the simple act of naming a bird or flower comes to feel sacred. Dirt concerns itself largely with character and with images of people going about their everyday lives. Farmers, widows and widowers, circus performers in their off-hours, and new, old, and estranged lovers all find their way into McDougall's observant glance. Satisfied With Havoc takes on a first-person view more consistently, lighting on many of the same themes as Dirt, but through a more intimate perspective. Both books are deeply personal, however, and both retain a keen and witty insight into the silent workings of the world.