Books
Oval, By David Till (Zone 3 Press, 96 pp., $14)
Till will read from Oval on March 16 at 8 p.m. in Gentry Auditorium on the APSU campus. A reception and book signing will follow. For more information, call (931) 221-7031.
Oval, the title of David Till’s new collection of poems, at first seems strangely at odds with the concrete particularity of his writing. His poetry shows scant evidence of the sort of austere formalism suggested by the reference to a pure geometric shape. The poems are irregular and sensual, concerned with distinct times and places, and he uses natural imagery to capture lived moments. The title poem, a 19-line remembrance of a father’s face, suggests something of the word’s relevance: …and what I saw was no face at all, was an oval / of dusky light the shape of a face that had gone / where the river goes. We get a sense here of some reference to eternity, to the cycle of existence. But it’s only after reading through the entire collection, which contains many years of Till’s writing, that the title begins to make sense. It’s not meant to evoke a form, but a state of being.
The etymological root of oval is ovum—egg: an entity that is complete in itself and at the same time the uncertain first stage of a new life. Till, an emeritus professor of English at Austin Peay State University, has produced in Oval a collection that encompasses the full circle of experience. The poems are divided into sections that begin with “Early Poems” and end with “Harvest.” Yet this is his first book, and it has some of the quality of a creative debut. There’s a sense of experimentation in the collection, of someone testing different paths of expression. The 58 poems take a wide range of forms and lengths, including everything from the expressionistic, fragmentary “About Trout” (…Go stardust / One goes off hot inside / yr dream hand), to the joyous occasional piece “Two Poems for Their Wedding”:
I could say: dogwood are like moonlight,
or like wedding gowns in the dark church;
but to me,
they are cold banks of snow in the mountains…
The disparate quality of the poems is offset by Till’s consistently gentle, grounded sensibility. He’s a poet of the barely noticed revelation, whether rooted in an encounter with nature or in a gesture of affection, as in “Work Songs,” a series of short poems for his father:
Pass the galluses, she said,
and went out to weed the garden, or in
to make the beds, or cook supper.
He stayed in the one big chair
we had, holding my ears for love,
and rocked and sang me to sleep
for all he was worth
and more.
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Till has had a full career as a teacher—writer Frank Steele describes him in Oval’s introduction as a “legendary” mentor to his students—and he is a founding editor of Zone 3, the literary journal of APSU’s Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts. It’s remarkable that he has waited until now to see a collection of his own work made available, but that long wait has given Oval a breadth no one would expect to find in a literary debut. Till has offered a completed journey in a first step.