Review of Darkened Rooms of Summer by Jared Carter

University of Nebraska Press, 2014  

$18.95 paper

by James Crews

The spherical stones were everywhere on the Oregon beach where we were walking. When I asked my scientist-friend what they were, she explained that they’re called concretions, and they form when a lump of cement lodges in sedimentary strata that has already been deposited, but has not yet hardened. Eventually, the concretions grow even harder than the host strata, due to pressure over the years, and they drop out, rolling down onto the sand. At the center of each one, my friend told me, is usually some nucleus of organic material: a leaf, tooth or piece of shell.

I could not help but think of Jared Carter’s work as we stood there that day, looking down at the stones. Perhaps I thought of him because each of his poems seems to fall onto the page fully formed, as if it had always been waiting to be brought forth from the earth, from the world we actually inhabit. Or maybe he came to mind because of the poem, “Geodes,” that begins his astounding new collection, Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems. “Geodes” serves as a fitting welcome for readers into a book that collects a lifetime’s worth of painstaking work, and while reading the final lines of the poem, it is hard not to think that Carter is also talking about his own creative process:

I take each one up like a safecracker listening

 

for the lapse within, the moment the crystal turns

on crystal. It is all waiting there in the darkness.

 

I want to know only that things gather themselves

with great patience, that they do this forever.

 

Isn’t that how poets know to break their lines, “listening/for the lapse within”? Don’t the best poems seem to linger “in the darkness” and then “gather themselves with great patience,” coming into being over the course of many revisions and many layers of words laid on top of each other?

Published as the inaugural volume in the University of Nebraska Press’ Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry Series, and lovingly introduced by Kooser himself, Darkened Rooms is long overdue, especially since it brings together work that, I am convinced, has no equal in American poetry at this moment. The amount of attention paid to every word, line break and stroke of punctuation lends these poems a quiet urgency that is more than hard to come by these days: It is downright rare. Though so many poets rush to publish book after book and for no discernible reason (we are not offered advances, after all, and publication seldom guarantees a tenure-track job anymore), it is refreshing to come upon a poet who has kept mostly away from worldly ambition, and who has instead focused his energies on the making of pitch-perfect poems whose drive seems nothing less than a genuine and honest urge to show us a corner of his own particular world.

The most surprising and delightful aspect of reading this book is bearing witness to Carter’s range, for he is comfortable in both the lyric mode as well as in longer narratives like the masterful “Covered Bridge,” which recounts a story about the Civil War that the author heard from an uncle at a family reunion. Though you have to read the whole poem to get a sense of how wonderfully and patiently Carter eases the reader into and out of a scene, here is a taste:

so when three mounted rebel soldiers stop

at the east-bank entrance, they look inside

and see my great-grandfather with the last

of twenty armloads of brush he has piled

 

against the center arch so that the draft

will fan the embers straight up to the roof

and fire the cedar shakes. The whole bridge

will last about as long as a pine torch

 

on election day . . .

 

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The “forgotten” clearly has obsessed Carter over the years, and his work asks us to slow down and notice what we too might have been missing about those places we only think we know so well. Carter’s earlier poems tend to take place in the imaginary Mississenewa County (though the Mississinewa River, a tributary of the Wabash, is very real). His project thus brings to mind Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, but his later poems seek and achieve a greater timelessness and universality that reaches far beyond any hint of regionalism.

他

Risk is the pilgrimage that cannot stay;

the keys grow silent in their smooth repose.

To improvise, first let your fingers stray.

Each time you start, expect to lose your way.

 

I cannot help but imagine a writer sitting before “the silent keys” of a typewriter or computer, trying to give herself the permission to “stray.” I think here of another of Carter’s possible ars poetica, “Mourning Dove Ascending” in which he discusses the uncommon, barely audible music of a bird taking flight:

It is a sound more rare, more hushed than song,

issuing not from the throat but the body,

the body working against time and space,

 

finding purchase, trusting in the outcome

of that endeavor . . .

 

The body of work gathered in Darkened Rooms has certainly “worked against time and space,” and it is clear enough to me that Carter has come out on top again and again, having “trusted in the outcome/of that endeavor.” His work will certainly endure, and this volume should help to cement his rightful place in American poetry as a maker of organic, authentic, and above all, sincere poems. One minor critique of the new book is that a few of my personal favorites are missing (the longer narrative, “Mussel Shell with Three Blanks Sawed Out” is one unfortunate omission), but there were no doubt issues of space to consider when publishing such an already generous sampling. And anyway, this is all the more reason for readers to seek out Carter’s previous collections, especially Cross This Bridge at a Walk (2006) and A Dance in the Street (2012), both from Wind Publications.

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