BOOK REVIEW

Loren Graham’s Places I Was Dreaming

By Austin Segrest     FEBRUARY 4, 2016

In Places I Was Dreaming, Loren Graham’s speaker goes back home: to Oklahoma, to his family’s tumbledown tenant farm—cow paths, grade school, trips into town. From the stories and sayings of his relatives to denigrations on the school bus, to a consciousness of his own “heavy twang,” he’s saddled with words’ “eccentric gravity / [he] could feel but not account for." This collection, Graham’s third, is a kind of “account.”

This “gravity” deepens meaning but is also, of course, a curse. To measure it, Graham makes impressive use not only of narrative but also of “country grammar” (to quote the rapper Nelly) and form. Thus, in the first poem, “The House,” the speaker’s “two-story wreck set back from the road” is a “crookedy tower.” More than kid-speak, “crookedy” is country, how his people said “crooked.” Graham manages to capture some of the aptness and beauty of these expressions without apologizing for them or being hokey.

Maybe the book’s most crushing note of country grammar comes in the form of dialogue at the end of the masterful poem “Commodities.” In the food handout line at the courthouse, everyone is “rigid and silent.”
                                    The man at the window
put a pasteboard box on the counter when we got there,
and I could see he put in a big plastic sack
of beans and a cloth bag that said CORNMEAL. Dad
hesitated when the box was pushed toward us.
                                                                                    “I work hard,
ever day,” he said, and the man nodded.
Form is subtly evident from the first poem. Free verse triplets in "The House" narrow to a point:
House of clapboard warped and gapping,
house with bees inside its walls,
house rats frequented.

Pile of loosened plaster and lath,
eyesore clucked at and pitied,
object of dread and erosion:

Yes. Yes. That house.
The one I called my house,
our house, home.
One of my only complaints about the book is that not all the poems end as strongly as this one does, honing the disparagement and decay to the point of “home,” “homing” in on acceptance of where Graham’s speaker came from.

Along with sneaky rhyme schemes and blank verse, a salient formal technique found here is polyvocalization. Strophe and antistrophe alternate between columns, indented lines, and/or italics. Though they don’t always do it for me, these poems simulate the throng of family voices the speaker grew up crowded among. From "The First Thing I Remember":
When this hand was three       when this hand was much smaller
they came forth to claim it     their little claws on it
to smell it, to tongue it          to fondle with incisors
in the long old darkness       my unknowing sleep

When this arm could not harm them         when this arm was tender
the killers of chickens           the gnawers through floors
walked over its sinews         traversed its small muscles
dragging their tails         like skinny dead worms
Here, the dominant triple meter and hemistichic echo creepily complement a dark beginning. There is not a longing to return to this home infested with rats. The book is not nostalgic. It was enough for the speaker to be the oddball among relatives, at once mocked and freighted with expectations for his book-learnin’. From "The Time I Didn't Drown":
the boy they all expected
to break out of the life they lived in that place,
the one who might have shown it was possible to leave,

even for the ones who stayed
But off the farm, there were bigger forces at work. From "Country Boy":
Country boy: their leader chanted it, dropping
his tongue to the floor of his mouth to mock
my accent and make it obscene, cuntra boa,
cuntra boa, until I learned that words could make me

obscene, till I calculated daily whether I had the strength,
if I caught him off guard, to slam his face
into the metal bar on the back of the bus seat,
to pay him for those weights, that name that was my fall.
As an outsider and other, Graham’s speaker, ever measuring, could never doubt the “heft” of speech nor take for granted that “equal” was “equal” when some “counted” and some didn’t (“Don’t Three Halves Make One-and-a-Half, Ma’am?”).
 
The shame of his “treacherous mouth” before teachers culminates in the cutting poem “Third Grade, Two Licks, First Day.” As in “Commodities,” we see what seems like an indelibly graven memory rendered as a spare narrative, this one, amazingly, in rhyme royal:
Raising my hand, did I lift my middle finger,
not understanding that it was obscene?
Or was she angling to produce a quiver
in any first-day third-grader still green
enough to dare to question anything
in that classroom? Or had she simply caught
the heavy twang in my voice and so spot-

ted me as poor?
[. . .]
                        Come along, she called,
I have something for you in the hall.

I went. She pointed to a little line
of shiny pennies, three on the tile floor,
and told me Take those home.         
                                                 But they’re not mine.
Go on. I’m giving them to you. They’re yours.
I bent over: They’re all glued to the floor.
I never saw the paddle, but she hit
me with it on the word, “floor,” two times quick.
Still, the speaker harmonizes deeply with his people and place—they are, after all, to whom and where the poet was born. The Romantic result is, of course, insight. In harvesting the “purpley stalks” of wild pokeweed to substitute for spinach ("Picking Poke"), he loosely rhymes, in couplets, with the land, becoming
the intimate of puddled lanes
 
that cut through creekside tangle, the exchanges
of shikepoke, redbird, raincrow,
 
little networks of wiggletail and tumblebug,
dogwood, poison ivy, redbud,
 
the way to wade a slickery cold creek
barefoot with a paper sack

of poke held carefully out of the water, the way
to negotiate agreement with a landscape,
        
to wander in comfort despite the copperheads and scorpions
we spotted as we searched for our supper greens--

to disappear into washes and dales
and inhabit them, figure in their folds,

until all places wild and unfenced I could consider
mine and myself their diminutive, their familiar.
In "Small Child Walking on Great Aunts and Uncles," even the laps of relatives become a native landscape he “trod on” as a small boy:
the scruffy ones, the gap toothed, the jowly.
The oblong of bosom who smelled of talcum and coffee.
Those who laughed themselves red in the face.
[. . .]
The warty. The blemished. The slope-shouldered and dewlapped.
Those whose breath came out in little gasps.
But why return? Why take us back there? The beauty of the book is that the speaker’s doing this for himself and not for us, that the writing of these poems brings its own reward, a self-redemption quite apart from our approval—as if he were gathering honey from the bees that infested the little farmhouse’s walls. In “The Day of the Swarm,” the bee man
tapped the trunk and all
that great wad of bees fell straight down together like one
creature into the box, and when they had settled down,
he put a lid on, and I felt the ones on my arms
and the back of my neck begin to whirr and leave me
for the hole in the end of the their new house, their new white

perfect house the beekeeper would soon load in his truck.
And something was there, hovering behind the bee man,
behind the sapling, the bees mumbling inside their hive.
The measure of a life, no matter the circumstance.
It’s constant, incremental decay. It’s sweet despite.
At his best, Graham, too, finds “the measure of a life,” homing in. And the result is sweet. Not sentimental, saccharine sweet, but sweet like they said it back in Old England: a dearness, good because the speaker’s life was good, his parents were good, “despite” being stuck, despite what they suffered and didn’t have.

But contained, too, in this “sweet despite,” in the archaic sense of the noun, is the outrage and injury of being “despised,” looked down upon. As Dickinson knew, “To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need.”



Originally from Alabama, AUSTIN SEGREST lives and teaches in Wisconsin. His poems can be found in The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, Image, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Blackbird, and New England Review.

Places I Was Dreaming. By Loren Graham. CavanKerry Press, 2015.