Review of "Waking" by Ron Rash

Review by Maria Rouphail

There is much to commend in Ron Rash’s latest volume of poetry, Waking (Hub City Press, 2011). In this collection of lyric and narrative poems celebrating the region of the Blue Ridge Mountains—its terrain, its people and their histories both shared and personal—Rash is particularly arresting in his contextualizing of stories and in his effective turns of the phrase. “Resolution,” is the first poem and it is set in italics, thus serving as an epigraph and an invocation for the whole of the work. Like the waters it describes in the opening lines, “Resolution” is dynamic both visually and aurally:

The surge and clatter of whitewater conceals

how shallow underneath is, how quickly gone.

The short vowels and hard consonants in the words clatter, conceal, shallow, and quickly, effectively suggest the “noise” of rapidly moving water over a rocky river bottom. The poem then moves to invite a withdrawal to a quieter place in the water where life abounds:

Leave that noise behind.

Come herewhere the water is slow, and clear.

This is the dwelling of crawfish that “prance” and sculpen that “blend with stone.” The reader is enticed to remain in this quieter, clearer space that promises to yield the rewards of careful and sympathetic observation. Which is pretty much what a good book of poems accomplishes in creating a contemplative zone for observing and wondering at life—our life—in its habitat.

Waking is not a nature book, per se, but Rash presents the domain of Appalachian forests, hills, valleys, streams, swamps, and sluices as integral to shaping the resident human community. The intercalation of the natural and human worlds is Rash’s principal subject. A governing consciousness pervades the work, that of an adult recuperating seminal events, of rediscovering a world of parents, ancestors, siblings, town characters, all of whom have “made” him. In “First Memory,” the speaker observes the dazzling spectacle of flitting dragon flies: “Their backs catch light, purple like church glass / . . . A green smell simmers shallows.” “[Purple] like church glass” approximates child-speak. The present tense verbs and Rash’s particular syntax that, for example, has “a green smell” effect the boiling of water suggest the concrete thinking and elemental sensuousness of a child’s “intake” of the world. The line also presents a compelling sensory fact that goes to sight, hearing, and smell (and by extension, taste). The final poem of the collection, “Price Lake,” manages a similar effect, a return to a core instance in early life, one that could not be fully comprehended at the time of its occurrence, but that shifted the world on its axis none the less, and in a good way. Here, the speaker cast his remembrance of the event in the past tense. His is the voice of an adult mediating the child’s discovery of his parents’ love story, when he—the child— came upon them in a tender embrace on the banks of a pond: “in that moment I knew / I did not belong to them / . . . so slipped away unnoticed [.] . . . “He continues, “[The] gift of that summer took / years to unveil . . .”

Rash is wonderful when the speakers in his poems treat of the interactions of parents, grandparents, and siblings. I was especially taken with “Water Quilt” and “The Wallet.” In the first poem, a “truck bed blossomed with sleep’s cloth,” a quilt hand made by the speaker’s grandmother who insists on washing the garment in the Laurel Creek, since its waters are the only ones pure enough to rinse away the silt of work grime, worry, fever[.] She tells the child that the water becomes one with the cloth, and so he “slept deep beneath the whisper of water.” An interesting aspect of this vivid anecdote is the speaker’s father— the grandmother’s son—who helps in the washing: “both mother and son unfurling / what she had stitched together.” In “The Wallet,” the father is shown to be both terrified and terrifying when another son, the speaker’s brother, loses his balance in a stream and nearly drowns. The father “flail[s] downstream,” “tripping on stones,” to “collar” his son. He is also desperately searching the boy’s pants pockets for what might be the family’s last few dollars. The father does not comfort the terrified child and his sibling, for he too is in jeopardy:

For this is October. My father
believes he’ll be fired soon,
will face winter’s cold coming
without thirty-four washed-away dollars.

This poem deftly dramatizes the scene endangerment and undoing, both by means of the crisp verbs in the exposition of the accident scene and in the enjambment and repetition of lines that offer the speaker’s reaction to what has occurred:

my father not saying, don’t worry,

a life is precious, not saying

something like that, not tousling
my brother’s hair and smiling.

“The Wallet” gives evidence of Rash’s considerable narrative skill. Where I believe he is less convincing is in such poems as “The Code,” a set piece about a highland character, MacGregor. This short poem feels ready-made in its gothic romanticism. As an overly compressed narrative of personal tragedy, the poem does not clarify MacGregor’s state of knowledge at the close. Does he know that his only son’s blood stains the shirt of the mysterious stranger to whom he has offered both unquestioned hospitality and a means of escape? Does “the code” require the father to complete the grim task of washing the blood from the murderer’s clothing? How should the reader feel about MacGregor’s predicament?

Rash also gives way at times to a Faulknerian syntax that seems flat, as in “Genealogy”:

From Wales to Murderkill Hundred, then
in one generation down the Shenandoah,
to North Carolina where tombstones raised
a topography of accident and will
across three mountain counties, otherwise
crossing only centuries. . .

In the main, however, Waking is a delightful experience. And, I was thrilled to encounter words—wonderfully sonorous words—that I had to look up. Sculpen (or, sculpin), for example, are venomous bony fish having many spines and large pectoral fins. Bottom dwellers, most species of sculpen live in salt water, but some called muddlers thrive in fresh water lakes and streams. Scorpion fish, rock fish, flat heads and sea robins are some of the exotica of this family. As well, a seine is a kind of net, one used to surround a school of fish like a caul. Anglers will be very familiar with these and other references to fish and to fishing, but I was entering a new and gratifying world. I am always happy when poets enlarge my comprehensions by availing me of more words I can use to name objects and experiences.