Blue Ribbons at the County Fair, by Ellaraine Lockie, PWJ Publishing, www.wellinghamjones.com, 2008, 63 pp., $10, ISBN 0-939221-45-4. Reviewed by David Chorlton.
Here is an entire collection of prize-winning poems, hence the beribboned title and, I suspect, the consistent immediacy of the work. Lockie’s note at the end of her book explains the celebratory attitude she inherited for competition while growing up on a Montana farm. Prize winners need to make an impression quickly, and this is a poet who moves along at a good pace and makes good use of each line. HOW TO KNOW A PRAIRIE POEM tells us what she sees that others might too easily overlook:
A sea of native grass and sage scents
narrated by waves of sound
with whispers from a skunk-drunk coyote
And inhaled smoke-signaled history
on hillsides pulls you back a century
into printed accounts of . . .
and on we go through stanzas that are a rolling landscape on paper. For the most part the lines are shorter, the tone less contemplative. Whether in the Himalayan cat with “Paul Newman’s eyes” or the MAN ABOUT TOWN whose “stride was a study in meter,” we encounter common observations and occurrences elevated by deft descriptions. LOST LEGACY describes Alzheimer’s disease “Where fragments of facts/atrophy into fiction,” and shifts key, taking its place among a number of sensitively written poems on such themes as old age. If one of these prize-winners stands out as a crowd-pleasing possibility to be read aloud, it is THE AFFAIR which is sharp and cheeky and ultimately sobering. As are poems touching on the bomb attacks in London in 2005 or a response to abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. In major or minor, there is an appealing directness here of the sort that concludes IMPERFECTION:
Fifty-five years and
finally unafraid to confront
the bare facts of human frailty