Letters to Little Rock

Letters to Little Rock  

by Jennifer Horne 

Kelsay Books, 2024 

Paperback: $20 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Eleanor Boudreau 

The loss of a loved one is devastating. As Tennyson laments, it is also “common to the human race /… Too common!” It is so common, in fact, that there is a poetic genre that deals with loss: elegy. Most basically, an elegy is a poem of mourning written on the occasion of a death. There is also a modern form designed for the occasion, and it is with this “Questionnaire for the Death of a Loved One” that Jennifer Horne begins her new book, Letters to Little Rock, a collection of elegies written after the death of her father: 

Your name: Jennifer Horne 

Relationship to the deceased: Daughter 

Full name of the deceased: Allan Wade Horne 

These straightforward answers quickly shift, as Horne contends that the book’s poems are the best responses to the form’s questions:  

Do you have any funny stories? Please see “The Pink Sheet Story” and “After Yardwork”  

. . . 

Every person changes the world—even if it’s in the smallest way. How has your loved one changed the world? Please see “Hot Springs High”  

The value of “Questionnaire” lies in the alternative route it offers readers through Letters to Little Rock. Horne’s book can be read in the linear order set out in the Contents, but it can also be read in the more associative and overlapping order proffered in “Questionnaire.” If following this latter route, the reader would first go to “Nomenclature” on page 69, then proceed to “The Rain Story” on page 40, and then onwards to other poems, eventually circling back to “Nomenclature” again. This more complicated and recursive method of reading, Horne implies, is the truer portrait of the “progress” of grief.  

In “Hold,” an early poem in both the linear and recursive routes through the book, the father’s death is compared to an incident where he forgot to warn his daughter that the hold doors of their houseboat were open. The daughter stepped into the open space and fell “flailing”: 

. . . you 

felt so guil- 

ty but I  

wasn’t ang- 

ry it was  

only a 

mistake like 

 

            when you died 

            and you were- 

            n’t supposed 

            to you were 

The short lines in “Hold” and their haphazard breaks—often inserted in the middle of a word—mimic the way death abruptly cuts the speaker of the poem off from her father.  

Horne favors short, clipped lines, like those in “Hold” in Letters to Little Rock. Yet, she still manages to employ formal variety. For example, the collection includes a simultaneously hilarious and calamitous villanelle, “At Your Funeral,” prose poems, and verses that recall Tennyson’s stanzas from his celebrated elegy In Memoriam. There are also memorable images along the way, including Horne’s father strewing “green confetti” as he wheels the push mower across their yard.  

Finally, there is the concluding sonnet, “Traveling Back to Little Rock.” This last poem (at least in the linear reading) ends: 

A scrawl of wintering geese against the clouds 

inscribes a path laid out by natural laws, 

but I must find my way in flocks of words, 

resolve, in fading daylight when I pause 

and hear the raucous melody they bring, 

to sometimes say the not-expected thing. 

Twentieth-century elegists, as critic Jahan Ramazani has forcefully argued, tend to be hostile to the genre’s traditional consolations. Writing in the twenty-first century, however, Horne is more amenable to solace. The shock of Horne’s father’s death is in “the not-expected thing,” but so is the gift of his life. Most importantly, her father’s memory is seen to endure and move skyward in the ascension of geese and words.  

Many excellent contemporary poets have written celebrated elegies mourning the loss of a parent, including Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths (just to name a few). More so than the universal theme of loss, these works are memorable for the particulars they communicate about both the lost parent’s life and the poet’s aesthetic principles. Each poem in Horne’s Letters to Little Rock, the title tells us, is addressed to her father, who hailed from Arkansas and settled in that state’s capital city. The elegies in this book are intimate missives, and they communicate who Allan Wade Horne was as a person, as well as who Jennifer Horne is as a poet. 

Eleanor Boudreau is a poet who has worked as a dry cleaner and as a radio reporter. Her first book, Earnest, Earnest? (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), won the 2019 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, a Florida Book Award, and was a Finalist for the Medal Provocateur from the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of West Alabama.