Dirt

Rating:
Summary: Poetry Without Gimmicks
Review: Jo McDougall's poems are heart-stopping and heartbreaking'the embodiment of what Stanley Kunitz calls "an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world." I tried to portion them out to myself, a few each day, and found myself devouring the whole because I wanted to know how she did it-'how she painted these spare, lucid scenes of life in the South without melodrama or flashy metaphors. This is the perfect book for readers who wonder why so much contemporary poetry these days leaves them feeling unmoved. After reading McDougall's poems you'll sit there for a moment, wondering what just brushed by and raised the hairs on your arm.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Poet in America
Review: The poetry of Jo McDougall is simple, yet vast. Her spare and subtle language weaves a series of poems that explore themes of grief and loss, longing and memory, and flow from images of childhood through old age. These poems find depth in their silence as much as their speech, being born often of situations and images which tend to demand a certain stillness unto themselves, such as burying a daughter, or the sudden, snapshot-like recollection of a childhood memory. McDougall's poetry remains honest to the stillness and silence of these moments, never failing to acknowledge the precarious territory that it explores between poetic description and those things the true significance of which words can often fail to portray. "As the coffin lid closes / over the body..." she writes in Dirt, in a poem entitled Metaphor,

...the silence
is sometimes described as noise.
it is not.
it is silence... (11)

By breaking down this metaphor and turning it on its back, McDougall exposes the ineffable underbelly of this scene. Paradoxically, we are brought to understand that the silence here should not be thought of as a "loud" silence; rather, it is the very wordlessness itself - the silence of the silence - that gives the situation its power.
Both Dirt and McDougall's latest book, Satisfied With Havoc, are comprehensive and approachable in style, the ordinary, yet crisp language lending a lucidity and a clarity of focus to the poems. In this quiet, understated voice, even the simple act of naming a bird or flower comes to feel sacred. Dirt concerns itself largely with character and with images of people going about their everyday lives. Farmers, widows and widowers, circus performers in their off-hours, and new, old, and estranged lovers all find their way into McDougall's observant glance. Satisfied With Havoc takes on a first-person view more consistently, lighting on many of the same themes as Dirt, but through a more intimate perspective. Both books are deeply personal, however, and both retain a keen and witty insight into the silent workings of the world.