Customer Reviews

Work, for the Night is Coming

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I was fascinated by the poems in this book for various reasons. While they are predominantly narrative, and hugely rooted in place (most are clearly situated in the fictional Indiana county of Mississinewa, even the more lyrical poems such as "Geodes" and "Meditation" sharing that geography) they are not self-consciously formal at all. It would appear that it is natural to Mr. Carter to write in loose iambic rhythms--most lines could be fitted to tetrameter or pentameter, but it is equally clearly not a structure he has forced onto the poems. I often finished reading a poem with an almost wistful belief that it WAS in blank verse, which I overturned only by going back and scanning enough lines to demonstrate the fallacy. There is only one deliberately formal poem in here "The Measuring" and even that has a rhyme pattern which varies between stanzas. Nevertheless Mr. Carter undoubtedly occupies a position close to formal verse in all these poems, many of which are in set stanzas and demonstrate lines of equal lengths. Another source of interest for me was the clear intention of these poems to document a place at a specific time, the Indiana of his childhood and earlier. This traditional function of poetry is often now overlooked and poetry is the poorer for it. As a non-American, I learned snippets of history, nature and folklore from these poems, such as "Tintypes", "Ginseng" and "The Strawman." Yet Mr. Carter avoids being prosey, either because of the richness of his language or the consistency of his rhythms. A great read!