Sherry Chandler

Marilyn Taylor’s Shadows Like These (William Caxton Ltd, 1994) is a work that shows off the wide range of Taylor’s poetic intelligence.

Poems like “Showdown,” addressed to the kind of overgrown zucchini that all of us amateur gardners have discovered lurking in the shadows under a big vine leaf, and “Golden Warriors End Year With Big Loss,” a sonnet on the sorrows of a losing football team, are rhetorical flourishes, designed to bring a smile or a laugh.

“Golden Warriors” might be spoken by a woman of a certain age, just a tad bitter perhaps,

—and some day it will dawn on on you
that your hard body (even as we speak)
is already inching closer to
a long, inevitable losing streak—

Others, such as the long epistolary sequence “Outside the Frame: the Photographer’s Last Letters to her Son,” are meant to evoke a more somber response. Tracing a woman artist’s year-long descent into illness and dementia, the letter poems are written in a variety of forms that become more and more disjointed, beginning with sonnet letters, progressing through short lines, and ending with a poem that wanders over the page like the photographer’s errant wit. She retains the language of photography as metaphor but not as sense.

One poem in the collection made me lay the book down in my lap and stare out the window for a while, musing on the whole process of aging. “Some Urgent Questions for the Peasant Woman in the National Geographic Magazine” is a poem in eight parts, each part a question:

2.
At what moment did you opt for being ancient,
for hunching your bright shoulders
into that rusty sack,
your fierce hair trussed and hung to cure
beneath your kerchief?

3.
Did you hurl straight from youth
to cronehood, or was there a brief housewifely
interval between?

I suppose, as a woman of a certain age, I am especially sensitive to questions such as these. But not all poets can make me feel them in my bones.

Our household got a robocall yesterday claiming to be the “homosexual lobby” endorsing our Democratic candidate for governor, Steve Beshear. You can listen to it here if you will.

The call has no disclaimer, but according to Mark Hebert’s blog that doesn’t make it illegal in Kentucky:

The call contains no disclaimer, and doesn’t have to, according to Sarah Jackson, executive director of the Registry of Election Finance. Jackson says there’s no state law requiring candidates, parties or independent groups to identify themselves in phone calls, like they do on printed materials, radio and TV ads.

It is true that Beshear has been endorsed by the Fairness Campaign, a Louisville-based group that promotes gay rights. Here’s the website cited in the calls. That endorsement is not going to lose Beshear any votes in this household.

If anything turned me against Beshear, it would be his tepidness about mountaintop removal. But since Republican incumbent Ernie Fletcher’s position on that issue is that it produces needed flat land in Eastern Kentucky, well…

It’s not surprising that everybody concerned denies having anything to do with this call. But considering that Fletcher is down 20 points in the polls and that Pat Boone [!] has been robocalling the state claiming that Beshear will turn Kentucky into one big San Francisco (I can think of worse fates), I rather suspect the Republicans are involved.

Pat hasn’t personally robocalled our house as far as I know. I guess some one must have told him that I threw away my well-thumbed copy of Twixt Twelve and Twenty about the time I hit thirteen.

Our ex-minister physician incumbant who pardoned everybody in his government before they had been charged with any crime has also felt an election eve urgency to post the Ten Commandments in the Capitol Rotunda, King James version.

The Beshear campaign responded:

If Ernie Fletcher had been living by the Ten Commandments these last four years he wouldn’t be in the mess he’s in today.

Mark Nicholas of Bluegrass Reports says that

the voters stopped listening to such Gods, guns and gays apocalypse since the 2004 presidential race

He opines that these last minute shenanigans are less likely to energize Republicans than to anger Democrats and make them more likely to vote a straight ticket. This will hurt down ticket Republican candidates like Secretary of State Trey Grayson and Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer, incumbents who were expected to win easily enough against Democratic opponents.

A little bird tells me that Trey Grayson used to be a Democrat but, being from Boone County at the very tippy most northern point in Kentucky, home to the Creation Museum, he decided he’d be better to cast his die red, a decision he might live to regret. Mark Hebert reports his lead is cut to 4 points in the latest Bluegrass Poll. Beyond party hopping, however, Grayson has the respect of some people whose opinions I respect.

As for Richie Farmer, Hebert reports that he has Rick Pitino doing his robocalling, a tactic likely to lose him some votes in some parts of the state.

Polls are open. Go and exercise your right to vote. It’s the most important one you have. The less you vote, the more the idiots run the nuthouse.