[events calendar & news]

[reviews]

[interviews]

[Michigan Authors]

[Michigan Literary Resources]

[masthead]

[The Jim Harrison Papers]

Vievee Francis, Blue-Tail Fly
Wayne State University Press, 2006

reviewed by Amorak Huey

America is yet a young nation. We are not so far removed from the wilderness of our impulsive youth, from the violence and passion and growing pains of a country struggling for identity. Blue-Tail Fly, Vievee Francis' impressive first full-length collection of poetry, gives immediate, urgent voice to this history.

These poems are set against the rough landscape of nineteenth-century America, but their true geography is interior: the human heart and soul and mind. An early sonnet sequence, "The Binding Tie," explores the relationship between a freed slave who illegally married an immigrant Irishman and fled with him to Texas. Theirs is no easy life, and liberty is not what it seems: "This is what freedom is— / a sinner's poor choice between what slithers / over the dripping branch and what you know / will always make its rattle heard below."

Perhaps there is no freedom. Perhaps we all are prisoners of our time and place, of our nation and race. This dark possibility runs throughout the poems of Blue-Tail Fly, in the musing of nameless soldiers, both Union and Confederate; in the grief of brother of a Tejano who died at the Alamo; in the laments of men on both sides of riots in Northern cities in the 1860s. And not only the poor and anonymous feel trapped. Abraham Lincoln dreams lustily of a black woman even as he struggles with his own racist thoughts. General Zachary Taylor mourns his role in the Mexican-American war. Walt Whitman agonizes over casualties of war. But there is celebration here as well, many of the poems invested with joy of self and of place—and celebrating individual will, the stubbornness that keeps us going. This collection offers a sweeping history, both macro and micro, through the voices of citizens who are larger than life and those whose lives are too ordinary to be mentioned in textbooks. It is a history of race and class, of gender and social status, of life and loss, of war and of everyday life.

To discuss this collection only in terms of its wise and insightful look at the American past, however, is to do it something of a disservice. This is first-rate poetry; this is writing that cuts to the bone. Francis demonstrates pinpoint control of her craft. In the sonnet sequence mentioned earlier, the poems switch between the voices of Andrew, the Irish immigrant, and Callie, the freed slave he married. The last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next in a blending of voice and self that is pure pleasure to read. These poems have music in them, echoes of battle hymns and slave spirituals. They are rhythmic and controlled, but never restrained.

Francis is adept at painting her scenes with short spare lines, as in "The Finishing Thoughts of Festus Spencer as He Looks into the Camera." The poem begins: "Dense topsoil. / Sieved field. // Spruce forest. / Blue bough. // Apple-orchard mill / Cider-peel mulch. // Autumn skim. / Ashen smoke." Not a word is wasted in a setting rendered with stark, even startling, clarity. Yet the poet is equally at home working with longer, sometimes lusher lines, as in the poem "Interview: Survivor, Fort Pillow": "So, I volunteered. / I was not pressed. Blood puddled between / my lips. I remember that. Like wild honey. / Like the bite into a bee flown into your mouth."

Blue-Tail Fly, published by Wayne State University Press as part of the Made in Michigan Writers Series, is an inspiring debut from a Detroit-area poet. To read it is to learn something about our shared American past—those things that have long divided us, and those that have brought us together. It is a lesson that resonates as clearly today as ever.

__

Amorak Huey is an editor at The Grand Rapids Press and is working on an MFA in poetry at Western Michigan University.