Books
In “The Calling,” which comes near the end of Bill Brown’s glorious new chapbook, Yesterday’s Hay, the poet writes, “I strain to hear the voice / of bright unopened moments….” It is his only lie in the collection. Brown strains for nothing. The ease with which he hears the voice, and then translates it into lines that are natural and clear, melodic and honest, is stunning. Primarily a narrative poet, in “Learning to Be Quiet,” Brown writes, “How easily the cry of a bird leads / to the realm of story.”
Raised in Dyersburg, Tenn., and currently a lecturer at Peabody College, Brown spent 26 years teaching in the Nashville Metro school system, while still finding time to write two other chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, as well as a writing textbook. He was a Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and twice earned fellowships in poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission. In 1995, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts named him Distinguished Teacher in the Arts. He is not only prolific but highly respected, both for his own poetry and his ability to teach others.
Yesterday’s Hay is made of 26 poems, but, because of its wide thematic range, it feels like more. Most are grounded in the natural world—Brown is a nature poet in the best sense of the term—and his subject matter includes just about everything under the sun: family, religion, love, memory, disease, war and death. His characters are humans, coyotes, ants, spiders, all manner of birds, trees, and weather. Unlike many poets, he writes in a deceptively plain style that both welcomes readers from outside academia and allows unexpected phrasing to startle. In “Cold Comfort,” for example, he writes, “Why the sound of night sleet / summons the dead has no answer.”
But Brown’s poems are more concerned with questions than answers, anyway, and especially the process that leads to questioning. In “Early This Morning,” the speaker examines his sleeping wife’s breast cancer scar, what he terms a “pale halo” and compares to “a bone tool like a scythe, / the rounded slope of elk”—and that is what makes Brown a nature poet. By poem’s end, the husband’s examination has moved him to ask how his wife will tell him if the cancer returns:
When is there a right
moment, though we have
slept three decades
skin to skin?
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Not all the poems here are as devastating. Some are downright funny: “Last Rite to the Queen of Grammar” and “Pan” show the poet’s playful, mischievous side. All are embedded with an understated wonder at the natural world. But as with any poet who traffics in nature, death poems appear, and with Brown, they indicate a smart ambivalence toward their subject. Some things, for example, are worse than death: “You might be swallowed / by the daily minutia / of the great mundane,” he writes in “With the Help of Birds.” But in “Driving Country Roads on Sunday,” death, no matter its promise of eternal life, is absolute defeat: “There’s nothing more certain than the grief / of leaving grass hills for an eternity elsewhere.” And in “The Prayerful Agnostic,” Brown writes his saddest lines:
In his fifties, lust hasn’t disappeared,
but a different surge, more dangerous,
haunts his blood: the hollow thought
of nothing.
If there’s a fault with this collection, it’s only that it’s too short. The poems are marvels.