Every poem is a performance, every performance an experiment. (Note to those who put a wall in poetry between page and stage: the world’s a stage, the page included.) The play on these pages explodes sometimes with music, bursts always with Tennessee — and with a Bible pondered in hearts there for a long time. There is a sense, especially in the beginning, that this whole book could go up in song: it dances from eye to tongue and demands to move, like walking into a Holiness church and getting happy.
The title poem (13-14) is a taste of what is possible here: “make of your voice a shaft of flame / shifting into cloud and back again // a rift in a wave, a crack in a wheel, / a road in the midst of the sea; / make of your voice a staff turned snake / turned brass turned tambourine.”
And with “High Lonesome” (16-17), the reader is transported to “Tennessee November: nothing slumbers: / in the barn, bluebottles’ ice-whittled shells / hue the tops of feed and water buckets, // inlay corn shucks and tobacco flakes / instead of the lashes of Appaloosa or Paint, / Everything which could be salvaged // has gone to rot…”
The series of poems that sing weapons in part two (29-46) begins with two virtuoso performances of sonnets (“The Arrow” and “The Bow”) and contains some of the most chilling imagery, as in “The Trebuchet” (34-35): “I teach land-bound things to fly, / turn mountains into missiles. / I loft more than hunks of rock. / With thought and craft, all may be / transformed to weaponry…” The last two lines of the poem — “like you, I’m an ingenious engine, / the union of force and intellect.” — rivet attention not only on weaponry but also on what it means to be human, also brought to mind with jarring clarity in “The Rope” (45-46), which ends with “Twine wasn’t made for this. I should be baling hay. // I’d rather pull a bucket from a well, / haul a rowboat to a dock, give an acrobat a path // across the air. That’s a kinder life for a piece of string. / I’d like to rig a mast up, and hear the sailors sing. // Take me from this limb, or if you keep me here, / tie me to an old tire, and let the children swing.”
There are moments in the last section when pure delight in sound threatens to overwhelm — but that is in keeping with the pentecostal imagery. Carried away, it will taste just right to some, even if it is too much for others. No one will call it bland, and most, I think, will find themselves singing along.
Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Melissa Range. Horse and Rider. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-89672-702-1.