Work, for the Night Is Coming, 48pp, $8
After the Rain, 98pp, $10
Les Barricades Mystérieuses, 44pp, $10
Cross this Bridge at a Walk, 109pp, $10
Jared Carter’s first full collection Work, for the Night Is Coming won the Walt Whitman Award for 1980. The book was originally published by Macmillan and has been reprinted several times by Cleveland State University Poetry Centre that also published his next two books. Carter is a Midwesterner from Indiana who after his military service and a period spent in Europe returned to his home state where he still resides.
It is the Midwestern landscape that informs much of his work, particularly the poems set in his invented Mississinewa County. This specific area of small-town America with its rural hard-working farming communities might, at first sight, appear insular, but in the best poems he explores the basic decencies of its inhabitants, not just in their struggles with the elements but with the bureaucracies, the changing patterns of life and the cynicism of the modern world. Carter records its passing, hoping that these values that built the USA are not totally lost.
All of the themes and elements that Carter will develop later are present in this first book, the tightly controlled verse, the recording of a lost way of life and the biographical sketches that he will expand to form the longer narrative poems in Cross this Bridge at a Walk. Here in the group of three poems called “Tintypes” he sketches the lives of three Indiana-born characters, Sam Bass, a nineteenth-century train robber, Governor Oliver P. Morton and the gangster John Dillinger, the original Public Enemy Number One.
He allows each of them to speak out to the reader. Bass, who had once stolen the enormous sum of $60,000 in gold coins from a train, was finally betrayed by one of his gang and was mortally wounded after a gun battle. Here’s part of the epitaph that Carter allows him to speak.
It took three days for me to bleed to death.People crowded around the shackWhere they had me, but I never talked.If a man knows anythingHe ought to die with it in him,
Like Turpin’s Black Bess, Bass also had an outstanding mount, ‘A horse that made me somebody: the Denton mare. / She could outrun any horse alive – / And any mail train, too’. Carter brings these rumbustious characters vividly alive by letting them talk directly.
Carter’s next collection After the Rain won The Poets’ Prize in 1995, although covering similar ground it is far more accomplished. The character sketches are now stories, almost moralities in the way they represent some past event. They no longer speak directly, but their thoughts and sentiments are reported without emphasis. In “The Gleaning” a barber called in to shave a man killed by a threshing machine carries the weight of the poem’s emotion. The accident has been described, the work ethic noted, the undertaker called and the women have washed the body, the stage is set for the barber to complete the ritual.
In the parlourthe barber throws back the curtainsand talks to this man, whom he has knownall his life, since they were boystogether. As he works up the latherand brushes it onto his cheeks,he tells him the latest joke. He stropsthe razor, tests it against his thumb,and scolds him for not being more careful.
Carter has an astonishing ability to capture such scenes; he gives them a visual quality bringing them alive. The reader can almost hear the ‘sounds of the cicada and mourning dove’ and the men’s voices as they stand on the porch ‘smoking their cigarettes’, unsure of what they should do. His snapshots of a forgotten way of life highlight the essential goodness of these communities.
A number of poems deal with the flooding caused by a reservoir. It should be noted that Carter’s reservoir is set in his fictitious Mississinewa County as there is actually a reservoir on the real Mississinewa River. A particularly powerful poem is “The Purpose of Poetry” that beautifully describes an ageing farmer’s way of life with the daily moving of his cattle from barn to pasture and then back. The way his dogs work and although it is not mentioned the ring of affection that binds them to each other and the farm.
This rewarding life could go on forever save for the flooding that will come. The farmer has the option of selling out, but chooses instead to commit suicide. Carter captures his last moments.
Always he had been aroundcattle, and trees, and land near the river.Evenings by the barn he could hear the dogstalking to each other . . . . ’
The predicted ending is unsentimental.
It was the clearest thing he knew. That nighthe shot both dogs and then himself.The purpose of poetry is to tell us about life.
All of the poems in this second collection are well made, many quite formal such as the title poem with its rhymed quatrains or the marvellous narrative of “Barn Siding” in 130 scrupulously crafted quatrains. A poem, or rather a verse story that deals with many aspects of life. Ostensibly it tells the story of a ‘picker’, a solitary man who wanders the backloads looking for old barns and buildings; it is aged and weathered timber that he wants as ‘It can fetch a dollar a board foot / with the right customer . . . ’
The poem in a sense starts with greed, then analyses the picker’s cruelty in his relationship with a woman. It ends with his salvation, brought about by the technology of the modern world. Although it is a page-turning story, the poem can be seen as an allegory with the picker facing various crises as he moves from the rural to a contemporary environment.
The formality of many of these poems is taken a stage further with his third collection Les Barricades Mystérieuses, a book of four groups of loosely linked villanelles. The thought of another villanelle may make you squirm, as the form has been enervated by workshops and poetry groups, but in Carter’s hands it is vitally alive.
In “Buzzards” he explores another of the themes often in the background of his work by revealing his pleasure in the natural world, almost with a sense of amazement that it is still there in a rapidly urbanised country.
the hills, the road, the limestone creek belowthe patchwork fields – to spend all daysearching for balance in the endless flowof glancing thermals – the unswerving shadows,they spread their wings, managing to stay,striving to be still, in silence to know –
No hint here of the stop and start of so many villanelles that are just exercises in form. Carter’s villanelles are poems first. In “Interlude”, that may be a love poem, the writer takes his companion to find a spring, they journey through ‘elderberry blossoming, and thyme / and saxifrage along the limestone face’.
But Carter is not just a nature poet, he will remind us of the importance of literature with occasional hints at other poems or as in “Comet” with the direct allusion to Dante’s ‘Al poco giorno ed al gran cerchio d’ ombra’ a line that connects through time to Arnaut Daniel and Ezra Pound. It is this depth of learning that permeates his work.
Another reference to Dante may well be found in the outstanding “Tankroom”. A tankroom is the place in a teaching hospital where cadavers waiting for anatomical study are temporarily stored. Dead bodies might not appear to be appealing and certainly one would not expect to find a love poem in such a place, but Carter allows his corpses a tenderness that they may not have had when alive and just as Dante’s Paolo and Francesca were blown by the winds, so Carter’s lovers drift in their medium.
they share a timeless urge – to be foreverlost in each other’s arms, having no shame,come together at last. No longer strangers,they touch in casual ways we half remember –
Carter has been well served by his publisher as the book is beautifully printed and each of the four groups is illustrated with a version of a woodcut from The Herball or General Historie of Plantes by John Gerard originally published in 1597. It is fitting that these should be medow-grasse, plantaine, field primrose and tarragon, simple plants that could and in some cases are mentioned in the poems.
Carter’s most recent collection Cross this Bridge at a Walk was published in 2006 and is the most American of his books as it consists of sixteen narrative poems recounting events and people hardly known outside of the USA. Long poems about Coxey’s Army, Civil War incidents and the Shakers may not immediately connect with UK readers. However it is interesting to learn that the Jarrow March was predated by a march on Washington by the unemployed in 1894 organised by Jacob Coxey. Whilst much of the information in these poems is too specific, they can still be read just as tales.
In “Covered Bridge” a poem about a chance encounter between a Union sympathiser ordered to burn down a bridge and three Confederate soldiers, you do want to know what is going to happen after the rebel officer walks forward.
His eyes are bloodshot; he hasn’t shaved orslept in five days. Two bars and a plated sword.Touches his hat. “Sir, would you happen to bea gambling man?”
Carter sets the scene taking his reader on a fascinating journey as he draws you in, leaving you wondering if the bridge is fired or not. It is splendid storytelling.
Even though the poems are tied to a time and place, most have some resonance outside of the USA, particularly “The Visit”, “Spirea”, “ Beiderbecke Sequence” and “Picking Stone”. The “Beiderbecke Sequence” consists of four poems that look obliquely at the jazz cornetist’s brief life, each fourteen-line poem is metrically interesting with just enough rhyme to give that touch of formal elegance.
In “Picking Stone” Carter returns to his rural landscape and writes his elegy for all hard-working farmers. Here he has the whole family from the storytelling grandfather to the grandchildren walking the fields to remove the stones turned up by the plough. It is backbreaking work and the wind and rain are coming on, but Carter imbues their enterprise with a sense of triumph, even though they will have to do the same thing next year. They are linked to the earth that they farm in a continuing pattern with the grandfather handing over to his son, as ‘He lifts nothing now’.
The grandsons wait to take over, already they have given up childish things no longer hoarding the worked stones they find but giving them to their younger sister. The grandfather recalling his dead wife knows that like the land the family will endure as ‘Sometimes he thinks/he can hear the older girl slip from the house,/go to meet someone near the pile of stones.’ Although the mood is elegiac, it is not cheerless; Carter shows that this bond with the land is almost a spiritual achievement.
There is something in Carter’s poetry that is worth seeking out. He writes well metrically and in a freer verse and knows when to rhyme. There is nothing quite like his work in the UK at present. One can detect the influence of Modernism but also undertows of Frost, Hardy and perhaps Crabbe for his storytelling.
What is striking is the lack of pretension, his poems are not part of a political platform, nor are they scoring points. They grow out from the literary past using a sinewy language that has been honed for the purpose. He has what can only be called an ‘ear’ for language. The poems appear fine tuned and polished to perfection, so it is a great pity that his work is not well known in the UK.
A few poems have appeared in Agenda, Outposts, The Dark Horse, but there is not a large selection of his work available in the UK. This should be a call to an ambitious publisher to correct the omission. For those wanting to track down this unique voice, his publishers are Cleveland State University Poetry Centre, 2121 Euclid Avenue, RT1841 Cleveland, Ohio, USA and Wind Publications, 600 Overbrook Drive, Nicholasville, Kentucky, USA. His work can be read on his website http://www.jaredcarter.com/ as well as at a number of on-line magazines.
First published in Small Press Review (UK), no. 4, March 2008, and reproduced here by permission of the author.
