Muscadine

Muscadine

By A. H. Jerriod Avant

Four Way Books, 2023

Paper, $17.95

Genre: Poetry

Reviewed by Daniel DeVaughn 

This review originally appeared in American Literary Review (Fall 2023).

The muscadine is an unusual fruit. Native to the Southeastern United States, it was the first grape to be cultivated in North America. Its natural range extends from Florida north to Delaware, and it can be found growing in the wild from Georgia to eastern Texas. Sir Walter Raleigh mentions it in an account of North Carolina from 1584, but long before Europeans were claiming to have discovered a new world, North American indigenous people were cultivating the muscadine for food and drying it for its blue dye. Nowadays, in places like Alabama and Mississippi, the home state of poet A. H. Jerriod Avant and where much of his gorgeous debut collection takes place, the thick-skinned fruit is used in pies, jellies, jams, and, of course, wine. Why, then, is it a relatively unknown staple, staying close to where it is grown for the most part, canned or bottled in homes? The answer is in the name, which is rooted in the Latin muscus, “musk,” which originally meant the glandular secretions of a musk deer. From there, one can trace its etymology through a constellation of other words, from “mouse” to “muscle” to “testicle.” Simply put, the muscadine is musky, sweet, Southern with a capital S, and singularly American. That Avant has chosen it to title this intimate and muscular collection shows the degree to which he and his speakers are invested in the natural world as a site of stability and deep identity in a country and culture which often seem to have forgotten the meaning of such words.

What does it mean to be from a place, to call it home? Muscadine seems to answer that home is the place that haunts, from which we carry memories that will not leave us, and even if we could we wouldn’t know where to put them down. In “Pride,” the opening poem of this collection, Avant writes, “Give me memories / slow to leave as snails,” where there are “[m]uscadines on center / stage as the native grape.” “Pack me    a bag,” he instructs, “I can fit    in my heart.” Immediately, we see the poet here acting as a spokesman for a place, a landscape from which names grow: Champ and Vernice and Robert. Here, too, we first meet Pops, the speaker’s father, and his presence becomes a kind of genius loci of the book, floating in and between poems. In one of [the] book’s most poignant moments, “Missing Person,” the speaker reckons with the memory of his deceased father which is triggered by the architecture of home, “the poetics of space,” you might say:

      I got a thing for fumbling through couplets. I hear him

      asking have I talked to Momma and he knows I have and what

      I’m about to say. How I’m knocking on the window of this other

      realm, begging to sing my confusion until he understands me.

      I’m eleven hundred and fifty-four miles from home, farther from

      him, and still, we continue this secret, of running into each other.

There is a physical authority and force to these poems, to the declamatory way in which they demarcate the bounds of their worlds, what is inside of them and what is not, what they are or are not, which is a searching toward a rootless and rooted identity.

Avant’s penchant for the couplet is indicative of a syntactical style of proposition and augmentation, point and counterpoint. It also imitates and bodies forth the poet’s concern with couples, the relations that attain between bodies and people, how one person or bundle of meaning brings itself to bear on another, whether for good, as here, in “Rocks”:

and you’re on your way 

to grab a man to live 

 

in your house who can’t

live in his own house

[…]

I’m in too-thick-of-a

bond with disease

the loose gravel

of a sharp bend       signaling

into        a difficult turn.

or “Ill,” a kind of meditation-ode to an uncle whom the town may perceive as “no good”:

          Ain’t no hesitation

when we love the man

who interrupts the town. 

School children familiar 

with the family interrupt

             school with versions of 

 

lewd and true confusion

involving a hard-to-love

man we come love.

A real generosity reveals itself as we read these poems, a faithfulness to a world truly understood only by those who live or grew up there. One gets the sense in reading these poems that Avant not only needs but intends to give that world what it is owed, not so that it will leave him, as a ghost or god to whom one makes offerings, but so that he can be freed from a conception of the past which might limit his present apprehension of that world. To clearly see it and so love it more completely. Such is the graceful logic of home in Muscadine. It is a home that Avant travels to, away from, and around, and all the while the center of gravity binding him to it is a “dialect,” to quote from one of the book’s two epigraphs, a way of speaking and so figuring and being in the world—idiom, vernacular, and accent. Here is the entire epigraph from Brooklyn hip hop artist Special Ed’s 1989 debut single “I Got It Made”: “I’m outspoken my language is broken into slang but it’s just a dialect that I select when I hang.” The other epigraph comes from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and it reads, “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” It becomes clear over the course of Muscadine that one of the cultures he assumes, one of the civilizations he supports, in every sense of that word, is that of his home in Longtown, Mississippi, the Black way of life we see as connected to the land and carving out a space in it despite the forces that come to bear upon it in the form of theft, violence, and death. So he speaks in defense, as in “All I Eat”:

            all I eat I kill all I need I say I already have

            all I eat I feel all I need I pray I already have

And “Two Pit Bulls and a Bone”:

             I ask from my 

head amongst the sick 

commotion, what could

force me to fight for things

that are not there. How form

might make a difference

in who might fix their fists

to fight for some real shit.

And he speaks in praise, as in “Hulett Street,” an achingly beautiful portrait of a place and a past:

             with the Jheri curl, shirt collar wet, 

             lips thick as two swollen thumbs

             sideways, glistening electric red,

             blowing strawberry Jupiters, 

             walked like she had wheels bolted

             under her British Knights, attitude 

             of the juice of a ginger root, her

             skin and speech, chocolates fit for 

             fundraising, curing sweet teeth

             and joneses plunging in 

             the courses of growing bones.

The instances of singular verbal and prosodic invention in Muscadine are too numerous to mention all of them here. Often Avant employs new forms (“The Mistaken Identity of Some Verbs”; “The Nerve of Death”) and new words to stunning effect; “o’em” (“of them”) may be the most blissfully correct example, to cite just one (“Freddie King Beatin’ Eggs and It’s All Love”). We witness a poet breaking and reforming the raw materials of the language for thrilling and highly pleasurable aesthetic effect, yes, but even more importantly, we see him building edifices of language that transcend place, time, style, or mode. As Avant writes in “Who Can Govern Themselves Out of Governance?” in a nod to American philosopher and poet Audre Lorde:

                     how do you fix

that which the house

has no tools to fix?

where is the resolve as 

bright as the wet face

of a child, the sight of the 

rigid origin of the break?

If nowhere else, it is in these pages, where Avant gives us at least a few of the tools, beginning where we always must begin, in language.

It is fascinating and heartening to hear from a poet who hails from the Deep South, who knows from experience its landscapes, flora, and fauna, knows the stubbornness of its red earth, the grace of its people, and the terrible void of ignorance in others, who allows the reader a glimpse, however brief, behind the shimmer of stereotype and stale discourse veiling a region that is at least as true and valuable as any in this country. In 21st-century American poetry, it is to hear, then see, a perspective that is at once familiar and utterly new in that it gives us a frame by which to consider the disparate and sometimes contradictory features of a long-misunderstood place and, more importantly, the people who call it home.

Daniel DeVaughn is a writer from Birmingham, Alabama. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, Poets.org and Texas University Press’s Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama, and elsewhere He is currently a Voertman-Ardoin Teaching Fellow at the University of North Texas, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing. He serves as Reviews and Interviews Editor at American Literary Review. 

A. H. Jerriod Avant served as a Teaching Writer for the Alabama Writers’ Forum Writing Our Stories program.