Jared Carter, The Land Itself. Monongahela Books, 2019.
Review by David Lee Garrison
It has been more than forty years since Indiana poet Jared Carter's first book of poems, Work, for the Night Is Coming, was selected by Galway Kinnell as the winner of the 1980 Walt Whitman Award. At the center of Carter’s work, forming its geopolitical myth, is his imaginary Mississinewa County. It is a place somewhere in the American Middlewest, where migrations from the land and from rural ways of life began over two centuries ago, and continue to this day. His new book, The Land Itself, offers a selection of sixteen of the Mississinewa poems, eleven of them heretofore uncollected.
The introduction, by editor and publisher BJ Omanson, offers deep insight into Carter’s work, showing how his poems glide back and forth, hauntingly, between physical and spiritual worlds, between present and past, between what has been lost and what is still with us. “What the poet demonstrates again and again—by an acuity of attention to the world simply as it presents itself—is that there is no clear division between matter and spirit.”
The black and white photographs within the book and on its cover, taken by the poet himself, have no human figures in them. They have the lonely look of Andrew Wyeth paintings—abandoned houses, a closed-up church, cemetery figurines, an old mill, spirea flowing over a wall and casting shadows. And yet, the poems are about people and their struggles, people and their wanderings across Midwestern landscapes. Jared Carter tells us their stories.
The poems are as stark, uncluttered, and unassuming as the photographs. The poet does not moralize or generalize or draw abstract conclusions. He lets the people and the land and the structures that remain on it speak for themselves. He draws back a curtain on the past and shows us birds in the rafters of a covered bridge, gas streetlamps it was thought would never go out, and a coffin filled with rock salt. Then he offers us a glimpse of the human context of such things.
What we hear in these poems are primordial echoes of the land and reverberations from little Midwestern towns. What we see and experience are defining moments in lives now mostly forgotten. In the words of essayist R. P. Burnham, Carter “knows that a lived human life is made up of moments, that in the lives of even the most commonplace farmer or druggist or carpenter some of those moments are magical and the very stuff the human spirit is made of.”
In “Journey,” for example, the speaker describes being in a train pulling away from the hometown station after the family goodbyes have been said. Suddenly, he sees everything that was formerly familiar in a new way:
I looked back at the tracks running through the middle of town, tracks I had walked many times on the way to school, with my friends, but never seen from this height, this angle, with rooftops and backyards and blank windows flashing by— and in another moment it was all gone …
What the speaker sees from the train mixes with a childhood memory of a woman standing in darkness, in the midst of a swirl of cecropia moths, and then “that too dwindled / and disappeared as the train picked up speed.” We do not know who the speaker is or where he is going or why, but we know what is happening. A young man’s family, hometown, and memories are drifting away.
Almost all the poems tell or at least hint at a narrative of some kind, but they often begin with description. “Prophet Township” opens with the enigmatic phrase, “Only that it was a place where snow / and ice could seal off whole sections / for half the winter…” The phrase “Only that” suggests that what’s ahead is not of great significance, but ironically, it precedes some serious considerations of death and life. We learn that in the dead of winter, the dead could not be buried because the ground was too hard, so bodies were stored in coffins filled with rock salt. The poem goes on to describe the burial of the community, so to speak:
With no heat, no money for seed, they knew they had no choice but to pack up and leave—head back to town, try to get a stake together, go somewhere else. They brought along what they could carry. Everything else was left behind: piles of old clothes, root cellar full of empty Mason jars, strings of peppers tied to the rafters.
The speaker in the poem occasionally drives through the old township, discovers a boarded-up home, and stops to reflect:
Sometimes I sit there in the driveway for a few minutes, thinking about it, knowing that if I step up to the front porch, or find my way through the weeds to the pump, there will be a slight breath of wind just ahead of me, something rustling through the timothy grass.
This is all that is left—an abandoned farm house surrounded by weeds, the sound of wind blowing through—but the poet preserves it, shares it with us.
Whole towns drift away. A real-estate appraiser, using an old map, finds the place where a little town called Summit was once a stop on the railroad line and
…figured out exactly where it had been, right at the top of a long rise you could see stretching for miles across the countryside. Nothing out there now but lots of beans and corn, blue sky and clouds. Not even fence rows anymore.
The appraiser looks around for some evidence of the people who lived there, but finds “Not a trace. / Only the land itself, and the way it still rose up.” The poem brings to mind Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” in which the words of a long dead, once mighty king enjoin a traveler to look out on and admire his great kingdom, where now “boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” The residents of Summit would surely have made no claim to any special renown as Ozymandias did, but Carter considers their loss and the loss of the places where they lived important, and he mourns them with this elegy.
Even though the poet eulogizes a past that we know only from parents and grandparents and books, he articulates the experience of generations of people, most of whom never gave a thought to writing about their lives. Jared Carter’s haunting and beautiful poems reach deep into our past, deep inside us.
A version of this review originally appeared in Mock Turtle.
The poetry of David Lee Garrison has been published widely, featured by Ted Kooser on his American Life in Poetry, and read on The Writer’s Almanac and the BBC. His latest book is Light in the River (Dos Madres). His reviews have appeared in New Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others.