Rose McLarney. Its Day Being Gone. Penguin, 2014.
Native Materials: Rose McLarney’s Its Day Being Gone and the Future of Southern
Poetry
Is there a future for southern poetry? The muscular narrative lyric, long the hallmark of
southern poetry, is all but extinct. James Dickey has been relegated to the used book
store—if not the thrift store. Is there any useful truth in the Agrarian myth of the
southerner’s lost connection with the land?
I think, for now anyway, the momentum of southern poetry is with female poets: Ellen
Bryant Voigt, Natasha Trethewey, the late Claudia Emerson, and now, perhaps, Rose
McLarney. McLarney’s poetic persona has something in common with Emerson’s.
There’s the staying-faithful-to-the-land-and-the-man-phase. Then somewhere along the
way she gets an MFA, not too far from home. Eventually, she leaves the land and the
man behind—deracination, breakthrough, transformation. From her new vantage, she
turns a critical eye on her past, but also works to forgive and allow herself her new life.
Although her book titles—The Always Broken Plates of Mountains and Its Day Being
Gone—clearly participate in the grim southern mythos of violence and extinction,
McLarney is increasingly critical of even her own motives. She finds in the prologue
poem to Its Day Being Gone that she “can’t stay away / from the hard images.” But what
she can do is interrogate those images. In her ambitious new book, we see the chiseled
Appalachian pastoral poem expanded, interrupted, skewed. We find more thought on the
page, more awareness, and less instinctive trust in image and symbol, even in that
ubiquitous, trusty southern motif, the animal: “I used them, then, as symbols…” (“What
Music Should Accompany This”).
Many believers in image and symbol would scoff at such quibbling and circumspection.
And I agree that kowtowing to theory is scoffable, if done perfunctorily and not out of
necessity. But I tend to believe McLarney. Admittedly, her excellent ear for speech
rhythms and syntactical variation doesn’t hurt things.
To Boys with Names like Wiley, or Loyal
Yes, much of what you grew up with had already faded—
there was less paint than rust on the metal, and littler
hope. Excepting memory and the hydrangea—
those were strange bright because your women
were just enough short of weary to pour ashes
around flowers and turn them blue. About memory—
looking back is the one thing you’re true to, that circling
the one ring you’ll wear, like the ring run
through the nose of a bull. That’s sharp enough—
the pull on the tenderest part, to move even a beast.
I think Rose McLarney—like Trethewey and Emerson—is in the seat of prophecy,
positioned to reinterpret Faulkner: to show with boldness, but also with restraint and selfconflict, that rather than the landscape “shaping and creating the life of man in its
implacable and brooding image,” that man has been the one doing the shaping (As I Lay
Dying).
Her new critical approach can be ascribed in part to gaining perspective. As she told The
Missouri Review, “as I’ve moved on to write my next collection, and had to move away
from home, I’ve begun to question how I remember places and how I perceive new
ones.” To her two foundational landscapes (her double depths, as I’ve come to think of
them)—western North Carolina and Latin America—is added a new locale, Oregon, from
which she triangulates past and present places and selves, forcing them into conversation.
This is quite a feat, emotionally and thematically. There’s a lot to work through in
allowing herself to return to those vivid images, for making sustained use of them. She’s
all too cognizant of the power play involved.
More than mere theoretical markings, McLarney’s new poems have dramatized selfconflict: the poet in argument with herself, which was Yeats’s condition for poetry.
At times she pleads: “Let me draw these connections” (“Landscape”).
Or:
…Say I don’t have to give anything up, I can keep
loving it all, and touch your arm, in this land where science has yet to name
many creatures, as rich in breeds as the tropics, land studded with trailers
and slash heaps that blaze into great fires, of plenty, even excess.
(“Watershed”)
At times she asks for permission: “Can I say / nothing ever is over?”; “Can I hope…?
May I suggest…? (“Imminent Domain”). At times she kicks against the pricks:
Aren’t we allowed indulgences? Having lived once,
then the leisure to tell it over, having loved one,
the chance to lose ourselves again—
(“Reprise”)
At times she reassures herself: “…it’s not wrong…To call / an exotic animal girlish”
(“Aloof Above”), and at times demurs and denies herself:
I can’t claim to understand the end
of a culture just because there is a house I loved
I no longer live in. The particulars I miss are so
slight (and so, I have felt, irreplaceable).
(“Tributaries of the Same Body”)
It’s especially powerful for a southern poet to interrogate the implications of how
landscape, that scripture of southern lyric, is treated on the page. And it’s especially
pertinent for a woman, culturally objectified and exploited herself, to do so. But the
power play isn’t unilateral. McLarney implicates herself. Animating the beginning of the
book, for example, sympathy for Appalachian women left behind and exploited by
patriarchal powers proves a kind of dead end. It only ends up reinforcing the passivity
and weakness of women, reifying the narrative of woman as exploited landscape. Though
she “won’t dream women do not have to first learn / what violences exist especially for
them” (“Pedestrian Heroics”), she acknowledges her share in the leaving, and in the
exploiting:
…So, I too must
move mountains. I must come to know
destruction, how to be driven by want
toward another.
(“Landscape”)
Landscape and power. This is the title of an influential W.J.T. Mitchell book McLarney
acknowledges as a source for her longest poem, “Landscape.” How do you literally get
power from a landscape? One way is by damming. Dams destroyed and are destroying
communities in the places of her youth: the Tennessee Valley as well as “Suriname,
Mexico, Panama, Patagonia / Costa Rica.” Dams transfer power to “other” places with
more people and money. “Power always is sent to serve regions other / than where it is
made.” “I have done as much,” she concedes, remembering “hot childhood days
damming / up creeks, feeling like a creator.” Now, as a poetic creator, she’s still getting
power from the landscape, from her past.
…Who doesn’t live
in the sway of the power of what’s pent up
behind them?
(“Imminent Domain”)
Damming, like power, is a blessing and a curse, and comes to function, ambivalently, as
an ars poetica. On the one hand, the Appalachian woman is “taught” that dammed up
“[m]ouths can say enough about the way you are / without making a sound.” Such a
“lesson” seems evident in the “Native Species” of her childhood river:
Molly crawl bottom had a downturned mouth
for bottom feeding. The commonest
fish, living even in ditches, Mollies found ways
to make do. And she could identify them
in however much murk because of how long
she’d spent staring at the same places.
(“Native Species”)
Confessing actually very little about her life, McLarney gets much power out of the
restraint of such a “downturned mouth.” But “My Gift” foretells her struggle to challenge
such holding back—or at least the “downturned” southern-gothic grimness of what she
does let out. Playing on the motif of traditional Appalachian “bloodstoppers,” she asserts:
…We do not have to keep things back now,
but break the tradition of holding in,
the grace of people closing up where they’re weak.
We draw them out, the reddest admissions.
Clear-cut, mountain-moved, flooded: these are appropriately overwhelming images for a
past, along with a landscape, being erased. In “Ars Poetica,” for example, from her first
book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, McLarney brilliantly yokes local chalk
mining, which erases mountains, with a chalkboard being erased in school. But in Its Day
Being Gone, she’s cognizant of the problematic nature of extinction narratives. The
“characters vanished / into the woods” are “the soonest turned to legend” (“Pedestrian
Heroics”).
McLarney’s greatest potential for exploitation are the suite of poems sunk in the middle
depths of the book, seemingly based on a time from her childhood spent in Latin
America. Here we see a marked resistance to making unexamined use of exotic materials.
The poem “Exotica” can be read as yet another argument with herself.
You don’t want to hear the story about the soft clutch
of monkey’s toes, how monkeys swung
languorous from limbs, showering down fruit.
But rather, the one about how
the blue-eyed Abando boy’s body hung
after he was lynched for robbing our house.
She ends describing a less-than-sensational iguana her interlocutor/self won’t want to
hear about
Even though I fed him on hibiscus,
and could describe so many lush, red flowers,
folding from the mouth.
Though the “reddest admission” of color spills out at the end of the poem, the lyric is
problematized. The lyric is an argument. The Eliot-esque folding flowers are not allowed
to speak for themselves in rarified isolation.
“The Same as Anyone,” based on an incredible anecdote from the tropics, is spiked with
threat that would have made Robert Penn Warren salivate. But the narrative is shortcircuited:
I was four when a column of army ants, twenty thousand
or more, raided the house, washing the floor black.
I climbed on a table, above the biting clamor,
and crouched, legs cramped, wanting water,
watching the ants swarm…
Instead of launching into sublime metaphor-making, McLarney makes the ants’
“sweeping gesture” into a kind of warning about the privileged writer’s tendencies, which
she gracefully and surprisingly side-steps. The ants’ formidable “column” is traded in—
with characteristic, subtle sound play—for what’s “common”:
…What I marvel at
most now is common, little, individual. To have met him.
And to see him again. So often that I’d know his back
by the slant way he walks, in any crowd. This better
than living among the numerous and always ranging hungry.
Still, a Romantic is a Romantic (“Its” day is, after all, gone), and McLarney makes
extraordinary use of her “common” materials. Take the flooding that ties her past places
together: the past as beneath us, obscured in the depths, whole towns and houses
mappable only by the imagination.
In Fontana, in spring, lines of daffodils
lead into the lake, along where flights
of stairs had been, to the drowned town.
(“Imminent Domain”)
Consider the book’s several instances of blind sensing (think, Romantic bard): a hound’s
howl’s “single sense’s map / of the land beyond here” (“Hear Him Up There”); or, in a
sporting goods store in a strip mall where the land has been unrecognizably developed,
the old, blind owner holding a hunting bow
…imagines
that it can, even now,
be drawn all the way back.
(“Bypass, Strip”)
Such “[t]ransformative washes” are so much “myth-making” she knows (“I Float”). In
“The Language for This,” she pointedly converts Elizabeth Bishop’s famous final phrase,
“the mapmaker’s colors,” to her own final “mapmakers’ errors.” Though it is precisely
colors that time and again have “strummed, beat in…set to singing, [her] senses” (“Guts,
Gleam”), the colors in Its Day Being Gone are always disputed—if finally, freeingly,
embraced.
Revisiting her proclivity for “hard images,” in the last third of the book she wrestles with
the possibility of choosing “different images.” I’ll end by quoting in full “Glossing the
Image,” an astonishing poem about archiving that comments back on her own circus
animals, as it were.
Glossing the Image
Archives collect old photos, evidence of endurance—women’s faces
stretched long as laundry hung out to dry but caught in the rain,
men with copperheads slung over their shoulders, hatchets in hand,
fields of tobacco filling every middle distance, acres of work always
between the subject and the shelter or church on the horizon. And now,
we seem to have agreed hardship is what’s historical. What’s assured
to be everlasting. Of all I see, what we’d likely say looks timeless
is the black and white view of cattle with snow along their spines,
scraping at drifts with hooves, working to uncover grass. Generations
have been seeing the same hungry scene. But can’t we change the constants,
choose different images? Aren’t there also beauty bush’s berries vibrant purple
just under the ice? Haven’t there always been? In those dusty folders,
there are photos of a wood-carver displaying shelves of shining toys he’s made,
giraffes as a man who has never left the country imagines such creatures.
And a gladiola farm, a family standing in the field won from mountains,
kept clear of rocks, arms full of glads. On some negatives,
the photographer has penciled directions. Take off that shadow.
Duly noted.