by Mary Sutton
November 18, 2021
Mary Sutton is senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets and poetry editor at West Trade Review. She was formerly the NEH Scholar in Public Humanities at Library of America where she worked with Kevin Young on African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song and the book’s companion website www.africanamericanpoetry.org
Mud Ajar by Hiram Larew; Atmosphere Press; 78 pages; $15.55
Rereading is imperative after first reading through the laconic poems that comprise Hiram Larew’s fifth collection, Mud Ajar. Much of Larew’s verse has the texture of koans. Their purpose is not to form concretized images or to reach conclusions, but to inspire a meditative state. Consider this line from “Our Us”: “Dazzle breathe these slanted nights / with gauzy stars and every most / as outside in us.” Like a Zen Buddhist master, Larew uses language to create puzzles, anticipating the reader’s effort. The ultimate meanings, if any, are ours to tease out. In “Since,” a poem that is written in run-on fragments, the speaker stammers through a memory, waiting for someone, ideally the “you” to whom he speaks, to come along and fill in the blanks—to remember what was and never was.
Mystery, all that we can never know and all that we strive to know, hovers like a ghost in this collection. Larew sets this tone both in the book’s title, which, visually, seems possible only within a Surrealist’s canvas, and in “Magic,” the first poem in the collection. In the opening poem, the speaker reminds us that the human body shares most of the same elements as a star: “The stars in your chest— / the sounds of their glow / their flash blink wings / their touch top skies.” Using only monosyllables, Larew recreates the universe.
Like William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, Larew seeks wonder in the mundane. His language, like theirs, is direct and unaffected, but redolent with local color, like that of those who inhabit the state to which he dedicated the book: West Virginia. In poems such as “Allelu” and “Listening Twigs” (in the latter Larew turns trees into a choir), he manifests the aura of the Appalachia—its Southern Baptist spirit and its Scots-Irish lineage. His attention to Coal Country—the heart of the United States’ ecological vulnerability and the butt of many of the nation’s jokes—recalls writer Wendell Berry’s similar fondness for Appalachia, as well as a wish to bridge the ideological and cultural chasms between the rural and urban worlds, between farmers and consumers. The only way to come closer is to demonstrate the ways in which we cannot survive without each other. This emphasis on communal spirit places Larew among “the New Transcendentalists,” as literary critic Susan Salter characterizes those writers who have built on the ideas of the nineteenth-century New England Transcendentalists, emphasizing values such as faith in community and the indomitability of the human spirit. This spirit is palpable in the book’s title poem, in which the narrator expresses praise for a day of plowing, feeding, pushing and pulling, and slogging through meadows to create, ultimately, “breakfast fields and feast.” Similarly, “Bread in Hand” is a Whitmanesque ode to those who produce our food (“bowls of life”). Larew offers unpunctuated lists of the workers who labor daily to nourish us: “baggers stackers sorters drivers checkers.”
Larew asks us to think about where food comes from, starting with the mud from which it sprouts. This orientation toward the soil, which risks making the collection feel provincial (is that a bad thing?), universalizes the poems. In 2015, Larew retired from his position as director of the Center for International Programs at the USDA’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture, for which he directed programs in food and sustainable development in Asia and Africa. He is also founder of Poetry X Hunger, which brings together poets from all over the world who are committed to ending hunger. It is no wonder, then, that Larew brings a Shinto-like reverence to all natural materials, even those that are sources of pain and inconvenience. In “Day-glow,” he writes, “God is inside splinters / And whenever floors creak or crack / that’s a glory divine indeed.” In “Tin Roof,” apples become “red round spirits.” The speaker is not their collector, but, instead, the straw against which the apples rest. The narrator of “Flecks” ponders the dregs of life and finds beauty in what usually startles or repulses us: “And mud grins / and shadows are / our dearest friends.” This urge to anthropomorphize the natural world—to uncover both its benevolence and its mischief—brings us closer to nature and may even elucidate some of its mysteries.
Larew’s work is most resonant when he taps into sensory memory. Remembering is a rigorous and necessary exercise. In “Since,” the effort is personal, while in “Achill Sound,” the work is key to knowing the story of a people. Larew composed “Ode to the Edge” and “An Gorta Mór” during his writer’s residency on Achill Island—a tourist destination in County Mayo, frequented in the past by writers Graham Greene and Heinrich Böll. The island is also the inspiration for “Achill Sound.” As with “Since,” the act of repetition becomes a means of conjuring. The refrain at the end of each stanza in “Achill Sound” is like an echo bouncing off the cliffs of Ireland, calling back to its history—particularly in the second stanza, which uses the simple past tense only once in the poem to recall the Potato Famine of 1845-52. He revisits this tragedy in “An Gorta Mór,” which in Irish means, simply, “The Great Famine,” and wonders if, in this time of prepackaged convenience foods, we can remember how hard it was and, for some, still is, to get the nourishment they need: “Our years are easy now— / all buy and bake or / folded warm and savored bright.” Our comforts cause us to lose touch with history, which is still palpable within us and around us: “How to hear the hungry-haunted clouds / their ghosts in chimes and echoes.”
There are echoes of Ireland, too, in Larew’s clever experiments with language. Here, he pays homage to yet another Modernist, James Joyce, with whom he shares a fondness for inventing nouns (“surelys,” “dammits,” “upcaw,” and “drowsings”). There are also Larew’s adverbial compound words (“everif,” “everknew,” and “alwaysif”). Like the bard of Dublin, Larew hears the music in language and mixes up parts of speech to create new meanings. In “Radio,” he reflects on the ways in which the past is both a gift and a burden, illustrating how remembrance can trigger the wave of violent emotion that nearly swept us under long ago: “I was foolsmack in love / like a thrown cursing / glass of milk.”
Larew loses his stride, however, in narrative poems that chronicle others’ lives. “Smart Dumb” is the hackneyed story of a young woman who has gone astray. But, even in one of his lesser works, there are still morsels of language to roll along the palate: “She was born inside out / the size of a heavy orange.” “Pretty Boy Floyd” is similarly underwhelming, reading like a caricature of a 1950s rebel, as played by Richard Widmark or Marlon Brando. “Open For” is a forgettable exercise in sentiment: “If time is gone / Then how to start / And how to treat my heart.” These weaker poems do nothing, however, to distract from the collection’s overall brilliance.
One reads Mud Ajar and wonders why Larew isn’t better known, especially within a literary world whose inhabitants would claim to be interested in conservation, food justice, and sustainability—issues which Larew has devoted much of his life to resolving. One is reminded of Robert Frost’s 1923 poem, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” when pondering the cause of this oversight. There is always something to say about those who have endured cycles of loss and pain, about those whose lives depend on the soil, and Larew has plenty to say. He knows that the histories and burdens of those whom we scapegoat and take for granted are ours, too.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Mud Simple: Hiram Larew’s Mud Ajar Is an Ode to Small Wonders
POETRY REVIEW
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