Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005130273
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by FRED CHAPPELL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
IN THE ROOM OF THE JUST BORN. By Tom O'Grady. Dolphin-Moon Press. $7.95 (paper).
Virginia is enjoying a remarkable poetic flowering. Here are two fine volumes by Virginia poets, and there are dozens of others published just in the last few years. I hope some diligent scholar is keeping track of all this outpour; it begins to deserve a chapter in Southern literary history.
Rita Dove is, I suppose, not strictly a Virginian, having been born in Ohio. But she teaches at the university in Charlottesville and brings to it the distinction of her 1987 Pulitzer Prize. She brings also the distinction of her delicate but resilient lyric talent and her fine but risky tastefulness.
I call her taste "risky" because I can't think of anyone else who would undertake the subject matter of a poem about reading the bedtime story, "Mickey in the Night Kitchen," telling us that she and her daughter are "in the pink/ and the pink's in us." And who else could speak with such control of anger engendered by a racist slight, as in "Arrow"?
"Grace Notes" is, however, mostly a happy book, celebrating family life, childhood memories, intellectual enjoyment and the practice of her art. Rita Dove is at the top of her form now, all swift grace and pointed observation - and she knows it. "Here's a riddle for Our Age: when the sky's the limit,/ how can you tell you've gone too far?" I don't know the answer to the riddle, but I hope that Dove will keep "pushing the envelope," as the pilots used to say.
"In the Room of the Just Born," Tom O'Grady's book, was awarded the 1989 Virginia Prize for poetry. It is a worthy volume. O'Grady's technique is purposefully rough and jagged, his rhythms uneven, his images jarring. In "Funeral" he describes the cadaver of "Everyman": "The skin of his eyes is crisp,/ And he protrudes, hung with red banners/ As the bugles sound/ Their fat, slow notes."
O'Grady has a dry wit than can show up in unexpected places. In a love poem, "Talk To Me," a sly remark about the South slips in: "Come outside, you say, and I will smell southern in your hands." And in "The Square" four lines distinguish the Deep from the Upper South: "In Richmond they ask your mother's maiden name,/ In Charlotte where you're from,/ But here where the southern heat suspends us in the past,/ They ask what you'd like to drink."
"In the Room of the Just Born" is much more serious in tone than I've portrayed it here, but it may well be that humor is O'Grady's best strength.
Two good books here, then, by poets Virginia must be proud to claim.
by CNB