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Leaning toward Emily Dickinson's advice to tell it slant, the poems
in Betty Adcock's Slantwise approach our losses, including
such disasters as September 11 and the crash of the space shuttle
Columbia, through happenings outside the public view—asides,
as it were, from the primary moment. The title faintly echoes American
slang, as in "wisecrack," which might be applied to poems here that
skewer literary critics, human self-regard, and the poet herself.
Reflecting also the folk speech of Adcock's native East Texas, where
much of her work has been set, the title suggests a middle way among
images of rising and falling, tropes that can confound the directions
of grief and praise.
From the strangely epic fall of one longleaf pine needle in deep
woods to the widening contexts of the Twin Towers' collapse and
a spacecraft's deadly descent, from the lyric movement of light
out of earthly things to the lyric rise of a dancing arborist and
a clowning roustabout, these poems mourn, celebrate, rage, and remember.
Slantwise fulfills the hope Adcock once expressed in an interview:
"to tell the truth and find that it is music."
from "Little Text"
I may have come for just this,
so long gone I can't remember bare
footlogs across the gar-infested creeks
or the heron thrust up for magic,
for instructions
hidden
in the hollow wingbone.
And the scissortail has cleft this light
with journeys all my distant life.
Under a stranded palmetto
the armadillo's metal is unzipped,
the flesh burst toward that furter
wandering in earth where more
the multitudes,
and into air
where memory breathes its midge-cloud.
Betty Adcock is the author of five books of poetry: Intervale,
The Difficult Wheel, Beholdings,
Nettles, and Walking
Out. A recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the Poets' Prize, the
North Carolina Medal for Literature, the Texas Institute of Letters
Prize for Poetry, the Hanes Award from the Fellowship of Southern
Writers, and Guggenheim Fellowship, Adcock teaches in the Warren
Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
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