Gods of Four Mile Creek explores the inescapable ambivalence we hold toward the places of our upbringing. In 68 exquisitely detailed poems, 19 photographs, and two essays, Phillip Howerton considers aspects of the world into which he was born–specifically the rivers, farms, fish, birds, and stubborn humans of the rural Ozarks. As his explorations of ‘Folks, Living and Dead, ‘ ‘Amusements, ‘ and ‘Displacements’ demonstrate, these elements may be gods of our own creation, gods which we simultaneously reject and embrace.
Howerton’s poems bring careful attention to individuals who ponder, avoid, celebrate, and recognize themselves in the elements of their natural world. By acknowledging their kinship with blackjack oaks, homeless groundhogs, or discarded milk cans, readers come to discover much about who they were and who they might become. In ‘Farm Team, ‘ for example, a lone boy plays baseball with trees and barn doors as imagined teammates. When ‘the barn foundation/ hits another grounder’ the ‘impossible catch’ is ‘witnessed by a crowd/ of Holsteins.’ And readers see the imagination and resilience which farm life once required and still requires.
‘The Farm Forgets it was a Farm’ begins thus: ‘The loft barn wears the same faded sweater/ every day, with elbows worn thin where boards are missing.’ In this personification of a farm aging into obsolescence, ‘fencerows grow unruly like untrimmed eyebrows’ and ‘no one/ visits.’ The poem ends with the barn imagined as an old man sent off to a nursing home: ‘In the unmown fields, winds with no place to be/ make a muffled uncertain shuffling sound/ like his stocking feet lost in his numbered hallway.’
Ultimately, Gods of Four Mile Creek creates a sense of being and belonging. And running through this landscape of place and self is a seven-mile-long creek, oddly named ‘Four Mile Creek, ‘ filled with joy, tragedy, and relentless change.
Jadual kandungan
Foreword
Gods of Four Mile Creek
Folks, Dead and Living
To Know This Place
An Old Corner Post
Peach Cobbler, 1973
Wild Cherry Trees
Keep Out
The Last Mailbox on the Rural Route
On the Second Ridge North-Northeast
The Grade A Milk Barn
Four Mile Creek
Old Cedars
Porch Swing: Stolen from the Old Home Place
September 15
Faded Now
The Farm Forgets It was a Farm
The Grandmother
White Oak Posts
The Google Car
Five Cemetery Poems
I. The Pasture Cemetery
II. Three Field Stones in a Hill Cemetery
III. Forgotten Women in a Hill Cemetery
IV. Field of Old Farmers
V. Black Cemetery Outside of Town
Amusements
On Her Blindness
Our Rainbow
Calling Names
Taking Roll in Head Start: Windyville, Missouri, 1967-68
When a Child, Hunting for Arrowheads
Learning to Write a Poem during Art Class in First Grade at Age 56
Rabbit Trap
The Bluebird Fades Beside the Indigo Bunting
Moon Shot, July 1969
Farm Team (Nine Innings of Senryu)
Upon Finding My Elementary Grade Cards and a Crayon Drawing
in One of Mother’s Scrapbooks
At Age Nine, Learning to Whistle
Petrified Turtle
While Cleaning the Shed
Distant Train
The Call
The Farm Youth’s Companion
Her Wheelbarrow
At Her Woodpile
New Garden in an Abandoned Horse Corral
Hidden
Ancient Cedar
Displacements
The Redbuds
Century Farm
I. The Folklorist
II. Mother Jane
III. Sister Rose
The Quarry
Homestead on the Buffalo National River
Barn Swallows
When the Milk Cans Became Unemployed
Lost
Persimmon Tree at Leyda and Summit
Barn Removal
Settlers’ Cabin
Journal Entry: May 13, 2018
She Recalls Moving to this Farm Sixty Years Ago
Groundhogs: A Parable
Prickly Pear
A Fence in Woods
Peele’s Barn
Wallpaper in the Abandoned House
Turkey Buzzards
Dirt, Tree, and Sky
My Mother Thinned Her Marigolds in July and Gave Me Some to
Transplant
Essays
Four Mile Creek
Off the Farm
About the Author