Postcards from the Interior, by Wyn Cooper
BOA Editions, 2005
It's hard to say what it's
like to live in Vermont, unless you use the one-liners: Ten months of winter,
two months of poor sledding. We'll pay for this warm weather soon. Lived here
all your life? Not yet.
Wyn Cooper, who lives in
Halifax, Vermont, and who is one of our few poets to make a financial profit
from his work -- partly because an early poem of his turned into lyrics for a Grammy-wining
song by Sheryl Crow, "All I Wanna Do" -- surprised me by discovering
another way to talk about living here. It's not like Frost's closely rhymed
narratives with their openings, middles, and snug endings. Nor are the poems in
Postcards from the Interior long: They're rarely more than a dozen or so lines.
Yet they catch something intensely Vermont.
For example, there's
"Postcard from Searsburg," when the writer, stopping at a house along
the way, finds his greeting cut off by the homeowner: "he doesn't talk to
strangers, / says that I should go away." But "I tell him I like /
his old car, I name the year and model," and soon the pair are sharing a
few beers and a secret, under the awkward shadows of the wind turbines that
give Searsburg its modern claim to fame. That's an experience only
"country people" know about, being almost sent away by shotgun, only
to end up in intimate conversation, from some small area of mutual interest and
respect.
Now, I confess that could have
taken place in, say, Wyoming. But not this next situation: The writer says that
when he bought his own house, a carpenter told him he might see hippy girls
skinny dipping down at the river in August. "It was / clear to him this
was the best thing about the house." Ah, I think I've known that
carpenter. Or at least his cousin.
The first half of this
collection is subtitled "Postcards from Vermont," and includes one
written (supposedly) at Robert Frost's grave, and another poem that's a
reflection on a 1915 postcard image of five men and an alluring woman walking
by them. So there are "postcards" from the past and present, as well
as ones sent "from" fishing season, hunting season, November. It's a
haunting way to tie time into the dimension of place, rooting not only in the
Green Mountains but also in the way the seasons ache under the breastbone.
People who've mistakenly moved to Florida come back here with a longing for
seasons that change, that have flavor and scent and challenge embedded in them.
In some ways the collection
recalls the Dream Songs of John Berryman, but there's no central character
other than the writer, and there's no slippage into dialect. These are
carefully spun miniatures, without wasted words. And when, in the second
section, the book becomes "Postcards from the Interior," with titles
like "Postcard from a Wedding We Won't Be Attending" and
"Postcard from Independence," each turn of line stays firmly attached
to roads, trees, grasshoppers, dust.
Come
to think of it, that's a bit like Robert Frost after all. But different. You
know what I mean? A cousin of mine lives just down the road from there, I
think. That's how it is up here, in God's country.