Meg Schoerke
Like Fire and Water: A Review of Fire Baton: Poems, by Elizabeth Hadaway
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Fire Baton: Poems by Elizabeth Hadaway 80 pages | University of Arkansas Press | $16.00
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In
her noteworthy first book Fire Baton,
Elizabeth Hadaway, a native of southwest Virginia, paints a complex picture of
the people, culture, and landscape of Appalachia; the poems, whether
individually or taken together, offer a mixed range of responses, so that
Hadaway's subjects are never one dimensional, but fully realized: she takes
pride in the region, but is also willing to criticize the culture, sometimes on
feminist grounds. Her criticisms, however, are always witty, and, although
acerbic, tend to be articulated with such verbal and formal dexterity that they
are not only morally astute, but aesthetically savory as well.
As the book's first poem indicates, Hadaway has a
double perspective on Appalachia, a view from both inside (having grown up in
the Virginia mountains) and outside (having studied as a Stegner Fellow at
Stanford and traveled in Europe):
Was
You Born Here?
"Cause
you don't talk like you was
born here," said my
probable first cousin,
at
least an eighth. "Coarse-bred,"
Yeats
called Cockney Keats. What
he'd
think of me I know. I'm
talking American Viscose, Magic
City Mortgage Co.
among
my parentage. But
marry that to
old moonshiners who read Cicero.
In
nothing flat--
in
rounded mountains, knobs where
where's whirr, peaks of
laurel burning into bloom-- I
start to speak,
sound
like a stranger everywhirr. The
Cure taught me Camus and
still the flatland bouncer asks, "You're
from somewhere, aren't you?"
As
the poem announces, she takes as her subjects the region's beauty and its
coarseness, and also creates a blend of the two in her very language, through
its mixed diction, wide-ranging cultural references, and playfulness with
traditional forms.
Although
Fire Baton includes sonnets, couplet
poems, and blank verse, Hadaway favors variations on the ballad stanza, a
regional affiliation she acknowledges outright in two pieces.
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She takes pride in the region, but is also willing to criticize the culture, sometimes on feminist grounds.
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The first,
"Living with Ballads: The Nutshell Bed," is an uneven experiment in
trochaic tetrameter whose ballad affiliation depends more on the dream-like
narrative than on any stanza form, since the poem lacks a stable rhyme pattern. The second, "Living with Ballads: Sidna Allen," is more successful,
since Hadaway formally pays homage to the ballad tradition even while claiming
that she lacked much exposure to ballads in her home:
He mounted to the bar
with
a pistol in his hand
and
he sent Judge Massie
to
the Promised Land:
the only mountain ballad
my
mother ever sang
the
years that she was raising me
on
Pop Rocks and Tang,
and
Grandmother thought secular
music
miles beneath
her
notice, so my mind is not
one
Sith Thompson motif
after
another, not green
wood
thick with noble felons,
no
Gypsy Davies to seduce,
no
Barbara Allens,
just
local Sidna, late
in
the murder song tradition,
coming
at you straight
out
of my mother's kitchen.
As
an acknowledgment of poetic influence, Hadaway wryly exposes an amusing
nurturing ground for her own "straight shooting" style--her interest
in taking aim at all sorts of stereotypes and hypocrisies. Again invoking an
insider/outside perspective, this time to the ballad tradition, Hadaway reveals
her formal preferences for imperfect rhymes and stanzas with line lengths that
vary from dimeter to tetrameter. The rhymes effectively migrate from the
perfect sets of "hand/Land" and "sang/Tang" in the first
stanzas to the interesting off-rhymes ("beneath/motif," "felons/Allens")
of stanzas three and four, to the conclusive blend of perfect
("late/straight") and imperfect ("tradition/kitchen") in
the last stanza. The innovative off-rhymes and the tension that Hadaway
strikes between consonance and dissonance mirror the tensions the poem develops
between a stereotypical Appalachian childhood (of the Coal Miner's Daughter variety) saturated in ballads, and her
contemporary, "Tang" infused upbringing in which she was only exposed
to the "late . . . tradition" local ballad, with its mythologizing of
a brutal killing as an act of independence.
Yet
Hadaway's penchant for experiments with stanzas of varying line lengths and
varying degrees of rhyme has mixed results. Sometimes, as in "Was You
Born Here?" and "Living with Ballads: Sidna Allen," the effects
are just right; in other poems, the rhyming strays so far off that it's hard to
hear, or else the shifts between occasional perfect rhymes and sudden pairs of
imperfect ones seems to have less to do with creating tension, and more to do
with problems with craft, as in the awkward conclusion to "The Consolation
of Philosophy," which aims for an abba pattern:
. . . She [Philosophy] chills fast, from berserk
to
overtly officious bureaucrat
of
God, all catches and backtracks--
maybe
the consolation of paperwork,
but
not a metaphor that really hacks it
in
my book where Boethius must wait
some
fourteen hundred years for engines, rails,
far-off
train whistles, and an accurate
description
of the Midnight Special, which
they
say frees prisoners with its headlight's touch.
The
beam illuminates a roach, a smudge
along
the wall. The blanket! Then it's missed.
The
allegory is confusing enough on its own, but the devolution of the rhyme
scheme, combined with some limping metrical irregularities, increases the
disarray, until (after the penultimate stanza where "accurate" could
pair with "hacks it" or "wait" and "rails" stands
unrhymed) the pattern dissolves entirely in the last stanza. The book contains
a few other poems where Hadaway stretches the limits of rhyme too far--or else
seems to strain to meet the demands of rhyme (it's hard to tell which):
"Magic City Mortgage Co.," where the narrative fails to get off the
ground, for example, or "Disney Ride Song
of the South," whose dactyls would fall more securely if Hadaway had
aimed for a more solid rhyme scheme than repeating the "d" rhyme in
each of her four stanzas ("abcd, efgd," etc.).
Yet Hadaway's willingness to vary her form is
commendable, and suggests that in future work she will likely not be the kind
of poet (common even among formalists) who strikes a signature note and then
sticks with it. The formal variation of Fire
Baton is one of its strengths; as she says in the witty sonnet
"Beginning with a Line from John Berryman," "I want to be like
you enough to make / some kind of music out of my mistakes." Moreover,
Hadaway gains cohesion not through mastering one form, such as the sonnet, and
repeating it, but through her distinctive voice, and her mixture of empathy and
acerbic critique applied broadly--to self, family legacies, Appalachian
culture, and the culture at large--throughout the book.
Some of the poems gain traction when Hadaway lets go
of external rhyme altogether and deftly plays with assonance and accrues
internal rhymes. Part of the cleverness of "All Short-a Appalachia," lies in how the
short a echoes throughout the poem's
blank verse lines, whose directness and self-assurance are miles beyond the
wobbliness of "The Consolation of Philosophy." Taking to task media
announcers who are scrupulous about pronouncing foreign words correctly,
Hadaway infuses her indictment--and her snapshot of Appalachian culture--with
the sound of the short a, that builds
as the poem escalates into the list of the last two lines:
No,
you didn't trash
our
water, gash and snatch the mountaintops,
eradicate
the chestnut trees, or plan
factory
stacks personally. You
just
trample out our vowels.
Hear
the whole
diaspora
slam down their beer cans, stab
their
classes' final drafts, and smash the half-
carved
radishes before they've had the chance
to
bloom as radish roses?
We do that
as
often as the quack newscasters drag
their
"Appa-lay-cha" out.
It's not like quaint
or
paid.
It's short a: acid, ash, scab,
smack,
catastrophe,
Cassandra, slag, last, wrath.
The
indictment is clear and high-spirited: why should Appalachia be so foreign to
the media--and to Americans generally? Along with showcasing Hadaway's skill
with assonance and enjambment, the lines also display her environmentalism (a
thread she weaves through many of the book's other poems, such as "The
Hundredth Summer of the Chestnut Blight," "Drinking Bottled
Water," and "Living with the Bureau of Public Debt"). As the
last line implies, Appalachia becomes a Cassandra figure, an overlooked region
whose ravaged landscapes deserve as much or more attention as the commentators
give to foreign catastrophes.
But the lines also reflect one side of her mixed
attitude toward Appalachian--and working class--culture, a stance that, as
other poems make clear, derives from her double perspective as a native who
"escaped" through education, but who has chosen not to abandon the
place and its people. Thus, while she's proud here of how "the whole
diaspora" rebels against the niceties of upper class culture, in other
poems she's just as willing to criticize her milieu, as in "A Refusal to
Mourn the Death, by Car, of Dale Earnhardt at Daytona," whose argument is feminist,
yet arises from close understanding of NASCAR's ghoulish appeal:
Never,
until we live again
where
a girl can walk
to
the basketball court unafraid,
among
many pedestrians a pedestrian,
watching
the red-tailed hawk
that
roosts in bridge cable braid
swoop
for its own delight
and
hers, and play
a
raptor-minded game
and
walk back home that night
as
safe as in the day,
the
sidewalk crowds the same;
never,
until we begin
to
rise against what lurks
behind
forty thousand poured
a
year into Benz's gin,
the
Bavarian Motor Works,
the
mouth of Moloch Ford,
those
average annual dead,
will
I attempt to grieve
for
him in particular.
I
have plenty to mourn instead.
I
slap no sticky "3"
surrounded
by a blur
of
specious angel's wings
on
my window, no
"Gone
to Race in a Better Place"
over
the years of dings
scarring
my bumper. Go,
buy
your black t-shirts, efface
your
own complicity
in
his last crash. I
will
admit I hold a grudge
against
the whole jock galaxy,
but
I didn't want him to die
and
I think you did, as much
as
you want to, yourselves.
You
eat the shafts
of
your steering wheels. Cigarette
and
gas stations pile their shelves
with
his face folded, half
in
love with asphalt death,
a
cotton/poly blend
exclusive
of decoration,
because it was no accident.
It
was ritual. I won't pretend
to
buy into that rite, to pour the sponsor's libation
at
the foot of his monument.
Hadaway
achieves a striking balance here between formal dexterity (as in her masterful
weaving of that long first sentence through three-and-a-half tight stanzas) and
eloquent invective, and can just as easily slip snippets of high school slang
("the whole jock galaxy") into the poem as a contemporary riff on
Keats (whose "half in love with easeful death" becomes,
appropriately, "half in love with asphalt death"). Yet the argument
works because she takes advantage of her insider's perspective: she knows all
of the rite's requirements, and refuses to worship at this temple. And she
gains credibility through the poem's tonal range: the poem mourns not the loss
of Earnhardt, but the loss of a culture of walking, and the attention to the
natural world that pedestrian life demands; and, more specifically, the loss
(if it ever existed) of women's freedom to walk the streets without fear. The
elegiac tone of the first stanzas shifts to the well-honed (and, by this point
in the poem, well-earned) critique of NASCAR culture in poem's second half.
The
range of tones, in fact, continues throughout the book, adding depth and
complexity of feeling to family poems (such as "The Black Dog of the Blue
Ridge," "A Good Half Hand," "The Banks of Hell,"
"Richmond Breastworks," and "Lumber Room"); quirky love
poems ("Moved, Lost Your Number," "Crop Cults"); and
"Fancy Gap," a long, autobiographical meditation on how place
imprints itself indelibly on the psyche. Throughout, Hadaway gains purchase
through juxtapositions of lyricism and satire, recognitions of beauty and
ugliness, that like water and fire, may not seem to mix, but that come together
memorably, as in the closing lines of the book's last poem, "Living with
the Bureau of Public Debt":
Any
river will do
for
holy, however poisoned,
if
it carries voices. Choir
of
broken things, keep on singing
"Look,
here is water and fire."
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