Sherry Chandler

Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig

I must start out by saying that I don’t like the title of Jane Gentry’s new collection, Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig (LSU Press, 2006). I am in the minority on this one if I can go by the reactions I’ve seen and heard myself. To me, though, it seems flip, derivative, and misleading as to the nature of the poetry inside. I wouldn’t buy a book with this title if it didn’t have Jane’s name on it. And that would be a mistake. These are exquisitely wrought poems.

Take, for example, “April in Your Garden,” which begins:

The day falls open out of the sky.
Even the cedar bent from the wet late snow
seems to rise up into it
like the richest voice in a chorus.

This is not a flippant voice. This is work of a quiet elegance that will knock your socks off.

I do understand why the poem “Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig” had to be the title poem. The scene it sets up is this: the speaker driving along Western Kentucky Parkway into the sunset on a November day and suddenly into the vision of a field of white pigs backlit by the sun, in light “bronze as a baby shoe”:

…white pigs,
a field full, eating, all snouts
to the ground…
That earth should take the form of this
strange beast, should eat itself and shift
into this shape! The bows of their backs
gold-leafed: snout and mouth to golden earth,
as hungry as one breath for the next.

This is the ars poetica, the central image of the collection, a transcendant vision based on a humble omnivorous (but highly intelligent) brute.

The free-verse lyrics of this collection range from Kentucky to New York and Paris (the one in France, though the one in Kentucky does get a mention in the poem “Taking the Train from Maysville to New York”) and over the years of a lifetime. They speak of loss and love, generations passed on and generations yet to come, thanatos and eros, the stuff of poetry.

Close observance finds the poem in simple, domestic items, as in “The Reading Lamp.”

On Grandfather’s eighty-eighth birthday
his children gave him a reading lamp,
which he trained on the newspaper
morning and evening. …

A situation mundane enough, but

On the shell a gold sticker glistened
embossed with a name,
a brand I can’t remember.
Whom shall I ask?

All are dead who had that small suddenly significant bit of knowledge: grandfather, aunts, uncles, father, mother…

I alone have lived to tell this
little story, and now I approach
the dark to which they’ve gone.
A last hope, that lamp
still shines, like silver,
gold, a wondrous light
which won’t yet yield its name.

If, as I have recently read, the “School of Quietude” is defined as prose broken into short lines, then there is some cause to place these poems there. It’s a school with some impressive alums, including Wendell Berry and Galway Kinnell. One might also label Jane an Imagist. Once, years ago, she told me that you find a poem in a thing accurately described. To me, though, she is Jane, a category unto herself.

And sometimes she grabs me by the heart and makes me see what I look at every day:

Realty

Rows of new homes, tidy in plastic siding, come
creeping over the hill toward the clapboard house
collapsing into its center under its own weight,
its porch barely clinging, that was built to fit exactly
the farmer’s rocker, the wife’s churn, her canning table.

This bulldozed valley, pocked with manholes,
will not be dark again for eons, its trees uprooted
that broke the winter wind and made the summer shade,
that stood beneath the fixed stars the farmer watched…

It’s been over 10 years since Jane published her first collection, A Garden in Kentucky (LSU Press, 1995), though she has had one letterpress chapbook, A Year in Kentucky (Press Eight Seventeen, 2005) in the interim. She is a poet who hones as carefully as the sculptor of the “Nike of Samothrace” who “laboriously discovered you, chip / by chip, inside the body of a stone.”

On Tuesday, Jane Gentry will be installed as Kentucky’s twenty-third Poet Laureate. If you are local, I hope you will attend. It’s at 10 a.m. in the State Capitol Rotunda.

Wherever you live, I hope you will consider adding this volume to your poetry collection.

1. Portrait of a warrior
2. Jane Gentry Vance, Kentucky Poet Laureate
3. Artist Enrichment Grants
4. Nature in Legend and Story (NILAS)
5. Repudiated Poems

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