Derelict Days in That Derelict Town

Derelict Days in That Derelict Town: New and Uncollected Poems  

By Alan May 

BlazeVox Books, 2025 

Paper: $18.00 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Jason Gordy Walker 

Alan May, whose earlier books received praise from the likes of Bill Knott, Jake Adam York, and Maurice Manning, has gathered thirty-six poems in Derelict Days in That Derelict Town, which will delight readers who appreciate absurdity, concision, and playfulness in poetry. May casts many of his free verse poems in couplets and tercets, and he includes prose poetry and concrete poetry, too; “The Washed-Up Actor” brings to mind scenes from The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and “Snow Globe” is shaped like, well, a snow globe. His sentences—short, choppy, associative—express a jitteriness inherent to most American surrealists, although May, when he’s not emulating James Tate, resembles a fabulist more than a soft-serve surrealist. Keeping in mind that May grew up near Florence, Alabama, and later attended UA’s MFA Program in Tuscaloosa, I view him as a weaver of tall tales in verse. He does not take on Southern dialects or phrases, but his poems include cows, horses, small-town life and its exaggerated figures. His scope is not limited to the South—his language being mostly standard American English—and yet I sense gravel and humidity around his diction and syntax. 

The series “The Boy and the Monster” and the poem “[A lonely boy with a pellet gun shoots the sky]” tell of an isolated boy’s internalized ferocity in a way that’s strange, entertaining, even touching, if not somewhat frustrating: “. . . The villagers chop // the monster into pieces. / Among the many pieces, // the villagers find / a bright-eyed boy.” The repetition of “villagers” and “pieces” in this grotesque account makes for a flat, dissociative effect, and so the last line’s tonal shift to the harmless image of a “bright-eyed boy” feels jarring. The boy in these poems is a strange character, and yet the poet convinces us to empathize with him. 

May tests how far we can suspend our disbelief and tolerate outlandish scenarios, as seen in “The Artist at Work,” which originally appeared online in One Art: “The morning ended as usual. / I painted with the color chartreuse. // I made a sandwich out of fire / and ate it as I was driving // around the room in an ancient golf cart.” The poem’s surface imagery comes across as utterly ridiculous (“sandwich out of fire” feels phantasmagoric, and “ancient golf cart” appears out of thin air, a hyperbolic trick). Despite the horseplay, May communicates deeper issues about the artist’s life—it can be a laughable affair, full of irrational demands and disappointments. Yet the creative process becomes a necessary pursuit in and of itself, as important as food: “. . . I ate / my goddam sandwich made of flames.” The speaker must consume a bit of hell, as it were, to suffer and endure the downsides of a life centered around artmaking. When May gives the reader enough space to identify the metaphors behind the absurdities, his poems become approachable, humorous, and worth rereading. 

The best poems appear in the volume’s last few pages, most notably “Rural Epigrams,” a series of five nature-themed epigrams in couplets: “Nocturne,” “Eclipse,” “Tomato,” “Ambiguous Night,” and “Buck.” The epigram has long been underrated and downright dismissed by critics who fail to grasp its historical and cultural significance, not to mention its memorability (see the epigrams of Martial or Herrick or Coleridge). May develops his own curious style of this form, stretching its limits, combining the visual detail of haiku with the epigram’s expected wit—sometimes quirky, sometimes biting. Compare the deadpan “Nocturne” 

Lone 

baritone 

 

in a choir 

of crickets: 

 

the bullfrog 

to the biting “Tomato”: 

Drunkard’s 

nose 

 

bud 

of a rose 

 

so ripe 

I pick your twin 

 

and you fall 

to the ground 

In Derelict Days in That Derelict Town, May’s leading poetic virtue seems to be play. However, I do not think it fair to label him an unserious poet, one merely fooling around. He does prank the reader sometimes, but he balances his hijinks with real-life images, such as those of “Bon Voyage”: “Light falling through the wrought iron fleur-de-lis / onto my dirty shoes. The wooden bench. // The crumbling gray and brown façade / of the emptied evangelical church.” The image of a ramshackle church will ring familiar to many Southerners, and May describes it with precision and aplomb. In “War Poem,” he ridicules and condemns warmongering, bringing to mind his forebear Bill Knott’s anti-war poetry; recounts with hard-earned compassion the death of a stray cat in “Winter Poem”; and ends the collection with an allegorical poem about a crow who cleverly escapes further torture from a farmer. Alan May’s latest poems will charm readers who appreciate dark humor, absurdism, fables, and rural locales. 

Jason Gordy Walker is a poet, writer, and translator who lives in Alabama. His reviews and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Birmingham Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He has received support from the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Newnan Art Rez, and other institutions, and holds an MFA from the University of Florida.