Dog-Ear: C.D. Wright's Further Adventures With You

C.D. Wright’s Further Adventures With You is a tight collection of direct, often plaintive, poetry & prose. She expresses a deep concern for the lives & rights of the dispossessed and the poor; while the prose is often more personal, the poetry offers glimpses of the poor you might find in her native Arkansas. The poems & prose are mostly compact and move quickly. In some instances the poems carry their own weight but the collection mostly, in this reader’s view, feels both hurried & plodding. This weakness also is its strength as it gives the collection a hypnotic pace that allows the reader to dwell on the stories within the poems even if the language of the poetry is not exciting or exacting.

In the first poem, “Nothing to Declare”, the speaker does not so much as declare, as in make claim, but instead remarks matter-of-factly about the state of things, a kind of understated declaration in itself. The physical world may change but how the speaker feels about the world does not; this is the emotional center of the poem and for the book as a whole. In small leaps and bounds, the speaker reveals her living space and how this shapes her thinking. She begins, “When I lived here/the zinnias were brilliant,/spring passed in walks./One winter I wasn’t so young.” Already in the first four lines we have a matter-of-fact hardness setting in. Childhood and spring pass leisurely in walks among bright flowers; then one day it is not spring and one is not “so young”. The speaker takes a strange turn and states “hearts go bad/like something open on a shelf” as if to say that exposing yourself too much emotionally might lead to a kind of deterioration. The next lines catalog some regional details that might have been everyday and close to home but now served people in a nostalgic capacity though not even that since the objects are no longer around. The sense of defeat is pushed along by the stunning revelation of being taught that “the Russians send their old/to be melted down for candles.” The quick pace of the poem, like a compact novel, takes along the speaker’s desires for children she does not have, giving out advice that sounds noble & romantic but hollow for the absence of children. Despite the sense of resignation in the tone of the speaker, the romantic won’t pass, won’t be given up. The idealism & hope for the best, keeping your head up, the worthy cause of celebrating the poor, campaigning for the good & for the dead — the poem culminates in its challenge and advice, what it does not declare because it is simply what you must do when circumstances are difficult:

Try living where you don’t have to see
the sun go down.
If the hunter turns his dogs loose
on your dreams
Start early, tell no one
get rid of the scent.

Like Donald Hall’s “Danger salts the meat of life”, Wright’s poem asks us to make the most of what we have because that is how you get past the change & hardships of life. (Here is where someone might discuss the ghost of Frank Stanford....)

Wright’s best poems in Further Adventures With You are mostly the short simple ones like “Carla” or “Slag”. These sad little poems succeed because they do not rely on any unnecessary elaboration, no further explanation of the moments they capture. They are small portraits where the information available to the reader is all that is necessary to soak in the sadness they possess. In a time where so much poetry is either dismissive of narrative devices or overburdened by narrative excess, Wright’s poems are a refreshing reminder that it is possible to present an episode of a life without getting into the backgrounds & futures of the characters involved. In “Carla” it is enough to know the old man the speaker has in mind loves a woman enough to never leave town in hopes that she returns & finds him desirable. Who cares who Carla is and where she has gone? The poem itself could be seen as a kind of ars poetica, a poem that does not feel the need to do anything more than it set out to do, that is, paint a small portrait of a man, where both man & the poem stay trapped in time. “Yes he could back the Desoto/out of the shed, coast to the blacktop./And drive until he ran out of cash/or splendor” but why would he, what of missed opportunity, that two way street?

Overall, Wright’s Further Adventures With You is a slightly above-average book of poems with a few gems. Many of the poems strike me as boring or meandering with too much emphasis on details that do not contribute to the poems as a whole though the poems succeed in establishing a tone of hope & sadness that keeps them from falling apart. In the end, Wright’s book is a good one to read if you are looking for poetry capable of delivering the impact of a short story without a dependency on bald narrative or raw emotion.