Sherry Chandler

While I was at the KSPS awards weekend, I picked up a copy of The Farmgirl Poems (Pearl, 2006). This collection, the first from WKU’s Elizabeth Oakes, won the Pearl Poetry Prize for 2004.

I have been eager to get my hands on this book for a couple of reasons. The Kentucky Feminist Writers series has made Elizabeth Oakes a fixture in Kentucky letters. And “a memoir in poetry” about Kentucky farm life in the middle of last century, well, that’s my own subject matter. So I was a little worried about having my thunder stolen.

A vain worry, as it turns out. I should have realized that no two poetic voices are the same, even if they are speaking of the same subject matter. Oakes’s voice is very austere. George Ella Lyon, in her cover blurb, uses the adjective “plain.” In her foreword, Donna Hilbert, who judged the prize, says the poems are “just right as they are, saying what needs to be said without an extra syllable, without rhetorical flourish, poems like quilts made from the well-worn clothes of everyday life…”

That sentence has a rhetorical flourish or two of its own and I’m not convinced that a lack of rhetorical flourish [addendum: which is to say no figurative or metrical language] is a mark of excellence. In fact, I thought the first several pieces in this collection were not poems but short prose reminiscences. This is my own subject matter after all, and I was holding this writing to a high standard. [Addendum: I may have been a little willing to dislike the poems because they got there before I did.] These poems deal with experiences I have shared — lying on quilts in the yard on summer nights to be cool and watch the stars, washing the chimney of a coal oil lamp. The flat, declarative sentences of poems like “Light” didn’t seem to me to capture the depth of the scene:

The light spreads out
only so far. At night
we all stay close.

But as I read on — it’s a short collection, language simple as a primer, you can read it in an hour — I was won over. Poems like “The Heat in Summer, Midcentury, Kentucky” and “In the Tobacco Barn” are poems I wish I’d written:

The closest I came to awe,
to the Sistine Ceiling, was
watching my father, feet
braced on two rafters a yard
across and thirty feet high,
reach down for tobacco
hanging heavy on a stick.

If you have ever seen men practice the yoga of hanging tobacco, you will know what she means.

The time of tobacco will soon be as foreign to modern children as the idea that a family could be happy lying on quilts watching the Milky Way, no radio, no television, no iPOD. For all the austerity of her line, I think Oakes has succumbed a bit, forgivably, to nostalgia for that time, has let the soft light of the coal oil lamp soften some of the hard realities. Nevertheless, she has done us all a service in capturing her ordinary farm childhood.

[The gorgeous cover illustration is a water color by Karen Patterson. This is a very attractive book, easy on the eye.]