Alabama: Poems
By Rodney Jones
LSU Press, 2023
Paperback, $18.95
92 pages
Reviewed by Katharine Armbrester
Reprinted from Southern Review of Books by permission.
In Alabama: Poems, Rodney Jones can render his home state with an insight so sharp that it bites and stings. The collection gathers his poems, prose, and aphorisms, and Jones is dedicated to both lyricism and cold reality: he examines Alabama with a mournful but unflinching eye for detail.
Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet whose debut collection, The Story They Told Us of Light, was chosen by Elizabeth Bishop for the Associated Writing Programs Award series, is the second poet to be elected to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. Now based in New Orleans, he can view his native land from a safe distance, and his observations of the rural life he was born into never falter.
Themes of religion, regional identity, and the often-cruel absurdity which can undergird both are examined in the poorly educated wilds of Alabama. “I am teaching the sonnet to high-school juniors,” one piece states. “’We can’t do this. It’s too hard. We’re not from New York. We’re from Alabama.’” There are unexpected suicides, anti-intellectualism, casual racism and cruelty, and conversations with starlings.
His evocatively (and often creatively) titled poems are their most profound when discussing love and religion. “The Heroes of Love” is one of the most memorable and perhaps the loveliest poem in the collection.
That first year the neighbors whispered…
the old lady, who looked like Gertrude Stein,
and the handsome, middle-aged gentleman,
spooning like teenagers;
a disturbance, a mild
displacement of the ideal.
Nonconformity in love is still rarely welcome in a society where young, fertile couples remain the photogenic ideal, and where older women are supposed to hope for grandchildren rather than for lovers.
Jones’ intermittent prose pieces are strongest when they are astute observations of rural, fundamentalist religion. In a brief piece about his mother, Jones describes her as a philosopher who “does not condone Paul, whose pronouncements on marriage strike her as fanatical. She suggests to my sister and me that we should not be indoctrinated. Nevertheless, salvation, like hard work, is expected.” He continues the theme of salvation in his following vignette: “It is hard work not to be saved. Even a mediocre country evangelist is seasoned in the very rhetoric of tear ducts. Like a murder ballad, he plays for teenagers. Like a lawyer, he plies the nearly innocent.”
Cruelty of various forms is also a running thread. “The more we care, the more dangerous we get,” Jones writes. This seems to be especially true when Alabamians begin to care for those outside their social and racial demographic. “After Bird and Leona visit my grandmother in the rest home in 1990 and they pray together, she goes to the guest book and writes ‘colored’ in parentheses under their names. Though she has loved them all her life.” The most emotionally devastating poem in the collection recalls how Jones, as a young boy, was told by his father to shoot a dog. Boys handling guns was not incongruous in his world. “I am Abraham bending / over Isaac, God / is merciful and I do not apologize.”
A somewhat discordant addition to the collection is “In the Living Room After Dinner.” This observation of the poet’s dementia-stricken mother and her sexuality could read as an invasion of the elderly woman’s privacy. The word “laughed” particularly stands out and draws attention. But in “The Manufacturing of Copper Tubing Has Changed Very Little in the Past 70 Years,” Jones mediates on reconciling the decay of his native land with his reluctant homeland longing.
Why do I think I am better than what I hate and will miss?…
Shall I come straightaway and admit:
It is to these pastures and fields I return to heal
When I dream the world is ending.
Jones painfully understands that you can’t go home again; especially poets, and especially not back home to rural Alabama.
Katharine Armbrester graduated from the MFA creative writing program at the Mississippi University for Women in 2022. She is a devotee of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood and intends to be an equally disconcerting playwright—she thinks Alabama needs one. Katharine has been recently published in the Lucky Jefferson literary journal, the Birmingham Arts Journal, and the supernatural Twilight Zone-inspired anthology, Step Into the Fifth Dimension.
