Rose McLarney Becoming My New Favorite Poet, and Just in Time for #thesealeychallenge
Day 1 of the Sealey Challenge, which—for the uninitiated—or, less-exposed-to-culture—or, the philistines—J/K I just heard about it and have never done it before!!—is today. The goal is to read one book of poetry each day in August. I think I’m going to try it, which means I will not be watching Seinfeld every night, weep. And I accidentally* got started early (yea, you can do that), reading each of Rose McLarney’s full-lengths at the beach last week. Here’s my informal review of her second, Its Day Being Gone.
The title of Rose McLarney’s second poetry collection was taken from an Appalachian variation on an ancient Scottish ballad collected by Francis Child. The song will be familiar to some, but the characters’ names will be familiar to many—Margaret, who killed herself when her lover married another, and her lover Sweet William, to whom she returned to visit as a ghost. In the ballad (which I am now dying for Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer to record), this fragment seems to indicate not just Margaret’s mourning, but her indictment of the lover who cast her off. Traditionally, the next verses often show Sweet William’s search for Margaret, his kiss of her corpse, and the death that befalls him there, but the section McLarney excerpts in the epigraph of Its Day Being Gone stops short of telling Sweet William’s story in favor of telling Margaret’s, but doesn’t even finish hers: the epigraph allows the focus to linger on the wordless appearance of Margaret’s ghost at the foot of William’s bed.
If one focus of McLarney’s collection is the cultural and ecological shifts happening in Southern Appalachia, it’s fair to see Margaret’s lingering ghost as an indictment in those arenas, too—a liminal space, a pause between cataclysm and its aftereffects. Given these poems’ scenes from childhood, with their personal reflections on McLarney’s mother and early years in the West Indies (her words—I haven’t been able to find the actual country her family lived in anywhere on the internet), it’s also useful to see that liminal space created, psychologically. So much richness and possibility in the space between the cause and the effect, or the path chosen but not yet traveled.
I love so many of the poems in this collection. I think the post-pastoral is a vital part of contemporary eco-poetics—I mean nobody disagrees with that—and Appalachian writers may have a special responsibility to create post-pastoral work, since their region has been so pastoralized/othered/idealized because of its uniquely diverse ecology and landscapes. Other writers in/of agrarian regions have hugely significant voices, too, but Appalachia is unique in that it holds both national parks and forests of unparalelled biological diversity AND has a long agrarian and mining history. McLarney is emphatically up to the task.
I want to spend more time in my next review talking about McLarney’s mastery of gesture, an essential component of great poetry. IMO, the best poetry out there evokes fundamental tensions in human life, and powerful emotion, by nuance; I’m thinking here of the Yusef Komunyakaa quote, “Emotional texture is drawn from the aesthetics of insinuation and nuance.” McLarney's second collection shows she’s moving toward mastery of this, and (spoiler) her third collection settles into it even more fully.
