Forage by Rose McLarney
This is Rose McLarney’s best book yet. It’s exciting partly because it’s truly excellent writing, down to the syllable, each poem trim and terse and moving, but also because this is the kind of Appalachian writing that I don’t run across very often: nuanced, trim, penetrative writing that just happens to be full of Appalachian imagery and a truly perceptive awareness of its tensions. This is not me saying I think most Appalachian writing is dull—not at all. But often, as I mentioned in my last McLarney review, “regionalism” (and I do need to revisit some of my grad school texts on this, bear with me) traditionally hedges Appalachian writers in, relegating them to audiences who appreciate their images and subjects but expect their work to fit a narrow idea of Appalachian culture. McLarney clearly never intended to write only about cantilever barns and red clay, and this collection showcases her ability to write incisively about barns and moonshine and Erwin Tennessee’s famous Murderous Mary AND to place herself, the places she’s lived, and her love for Southern Appalachia in the most important national (and international) cultural and ecological conversations of this very moment. Brava.
I think “Uncollected” is a great example of McLarney’s adherence to a ‘wabi-sabi’ principle of beauty and completion, one that celebrates imperfection and transience. IMO, the only principle of beauty worth loving, and one fitted to human experience and the experience of people from—you guessed it—Appalachia, people often still very close to a history (and current reality) of economic hardship and plundering of natural resources. I felt this in her previous collections, where poems left space open for unpronounceable desire to be met, but Forage brings a firmer acceptance of the imperfect (even in death, or decay) beauty as-is. In “Uncollected,” the symmetry of couplets is consciously broken, spaces of absence and decomposition conspicuously sweetened: “Best that some things are left in disuse, lustrously dangling” (50).
I savored McLarney’s brief, clear evocations of unsayable enormity—grief, love, ‘terroir,’ abuse—in her first book; in Forage, the enormous has lost some of its power as the voice of the poet gained strength. Terrors remain—climate catastrophe, extinction and habitat loss, drying watersheds, human ignorance—but the poems fulfill what is, in my mind, a poem’s highest calling, which is to encapsulate the enormous in a clear orb. To be ruthless, to be direct, to be lucid, to discover what is beautiful, and to close no doors.
Another note is McLarney’s excellent pregnancy poem, “Little Monster, Masterpiece.” After an early poem in which she considers the revelation that she may not be able to have a child, stumbling upon this poem late in the collection was delightful. Like the best pregnancy/motherhood poems, it’s a reflection on maternal ambivalence and what it means to pull back a lever and set unknowable machinery in perpetual motion. Most of this collection is in fact a meditation on the vast mechanisms humanity has created but cannot (at present) control, and their irreversible destruction. But these aren’t the words of a doomsayer or cynic—McLarney’s voice has the authority of a prophet, and grasps, for us, the hope extant in our unknowable future, in life’s infinite possibilities.
