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Satisfied with Havoc (Autumn House Poetry)

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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."

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.

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.

Fortunately for her readers, Jo McDougall's havoc contains refreshingly simple and masterfully constructed poems that speak to the chaos settling like dust on the fine lines between life and death, past and present. In this book, McDougall's tone is that of storyteller, passing on her humble understanding of family, memory, country living, and more, with a serene complacency that heralds her title's "Satisfied".