Debra Allbery, Walking Distance (Pittsburgh, 1991)

I figured it was high time for a re-read of this volume (one of the first, if memory serves, I ever reviewed for the Barn) after a span of years. Allbery is a rural poet, focused mainly on small-town life and the horrors, however existential, of childhood therein. Her lines remind me of these annoying Ohio winters; sparse, unforgivably cold, but the heavens open up and dump on us so rarely that it's still safe to venture out now and again for the sheer joy of basking in below freezing air. It's not thrilling for those who have to do it every day, but it's a refreshing change from the desiccation of survival in an office building.

Few enough poets today are even attempting spare, and of those, fewer still know how to do it right; the art of minimal poetry is knowing what to cut out and when. Cut out too much and you run the risk of being indecipherable; cut out too little and you run the risk of being William Carlos Williams (toward the end of his career). Allbery walks the line from first page to last in this book, and she never once falls into the safety net. There is great beauty here, for those who know the landscape about which she writes (both the physical landscape and the emotional); like most truly wonderful American poets working today, she is almost unknown, and that is a tragedy. **** ½

One glimpses an amazing inner life in Walking Distance, a dark sense of humor--the real, somber music of midwestern childhood. One of my favorite lines: "Back then I prayed nights out of the same superstition that kept me from using the coffee table Bible as a coaster..." These are stories as well as poems, songs which resonate with and retrieve forgotten smirkings and smiles at the constant, odd, beautiful sadness of life. Excellent!