Reading Rose McLarney’s Debut Collection
Like many literature students from Appalachia, I was corn-fed: raised on Mid-western literature, Great Plains literature, Western and New England literature. This is the canon. I’m not mad about it, except occasionally. Getting to know Appalachian writers as a graduate student was when I got a little mad, because of how many great writers have come from my home region of southern Appalachia and written incredible pieces of great artistry but simply couldn’t get the right kind of press. C’est la vie. Except when it’s not?
Rose McLarney, for instance. She was writing this remarkable poetry collection—The Always Broken Plates of Mountains—when I was mooning over Robert Hass. Who is incredible. But he’s incredible about the human experience & male/masculine experience & California. Rose McLarney is incredible about the human experience & female/femme experience & Southern Appalachia. I acknowledge the false dichotomy there but I’ll use it for now, bear with me.
I'm also a Southern Appalachian female poet, and I occasionally looked up from these poems to the world around me to get out of the feeling that I was looking into a mirror, or reading my own words. It is a great feeling to have consumed the poetry canon with the distinct sense of looking out a window—looking through a male gaze, looking at unfamiliar landscapes—and to then find Rose McLarney, speaking the language of my life and region.
Poets from this area tend to get pinned and mounted in a “Regionalism: Appalachia” case. I’ve seen McLarney express an intention to consciously participate in what we might call regionalism, and her use of and subversion of the genre begins in a subtle way in this debut collection BUT when I read this collection I was thinking “eco-poetics” and “post-pastoral,” not “Appalachian.” The poems just happened to populated with Southern Appalachian images, sounds, and fragrances.
McLarney's poems are almost severe in their simplicity, and since they deal with load-bearing pillars of human experience—loss of love, the persistence of memory, the mind’s endless efforts to make sense of chaos—they are poems that bring tears to the eyes with a single phrase. I kept being surprised, as the technical interest and detail in many of McLarney’s poems about woodworking, farming, or householding—all utilizing precise, succinct vernacular and jargon—led to a masterful emotional dip and rise.
These poems are not emotional, in the sense that they reliably evoke blunt emotion, however. I found the voice of the poems remarkably still, and reserved. They are intelligent, as many reviewers have remarked, and reserved intelligence is such a fine thing in poetry. McLarney manages to evoke in a very few words the shape of a feeling: of desire independent of object (in “Desire,” maybe my favorite poem in the collection), of the familiar loneliness of trauma (my word, not hers) -induced isolation and mistrust, and of human efforts to invest animal farming with symbol, meaning, even absolution. This collection is understated, evocative, full of complex thought and so many kinds of yearning. I think the ideas of “sonder” and sehnsucht are at home, here.
On to the next McLarney collection, Its Day Being Gone (2014)!
