Poems of Planting—and Burial by Jonathan Everitt

Tamp
By Denton Loving
Mercer University Press
62 pages

When a poet invites you on an intimate tour of his native Appalachian countryside: Go. Such is the invitation Denton Loving extends to us with Tamp, his bittersweet, atmospheric second collection. Neatly shaped free verse with a mix of poems broken into couplets, tercets, and longer stanzas, the collection will draw you in from its very first reflection. The opener, “Hurtling,” sets the tone for a book centered on a father who has died, the land where he lived, and the son he left behind. “I’m five again, and it’s so dark I can’t see /the road. Are we going through a tunnel?” begins the poem—quickly followed in its second stanza with “My dead father says, No. Go back to sleep.”

From there, the poet takes the reader across a landscape, stopping at simple locales like a fencepost, a pasture, a missing pair of gloves. Sometimes, the poems read like fragments from a son’s journal. Other times, as if from a songbook in praise of rural life. Still, each piece shares a common richness, like the unfiltered fragrance of a farm across the seasons, with its fields, fruit, manure, and barnwood. It is, naturally, a landscape where life routinely arrives and departs.

Therein lies the power of the collection’s perfect title, Tamp: it’s what we do to the earth when we plant, build, and bury. And in this book, the earth plays a major role. At times, the poet seems to embody the earth itself. After all, where else do we bury grief and pain?

This question comes into play in the poem “Unburied” (“Of cow bones, too— / unburied by wild dogs and packs of coyotes / that howl in the night—hungering for flesh, finding all that’s left is bone”). Does “unburied” mean “unearthed” or “not yet buried”? Memories yet to be laid to rest? Or those that emerge like bones from soil, shocking and stripped?

The poet also embodies the scene itself in “Another River of the Underworld”, where he writes, “In my dreams, I walk the banks / of an ancient, unnamed river / surrounding the island of my dead. / My heart is a boat with leaking ribs”—a vessel incapable of reaching the departed.

And in “Foundation”, the poet describes a son helping his now-frail father plant a peach tree with the line, “For him, I tear the earth open.” The speaker plants the tree, then tamps the soil. Long after the tree is planted, the reader can linger on that line. For him, I tear the earth open. To plant, to build, or to bury? Considering the range of emotional terrain the collection covers, the poet’s purpose could be any—or all.

Loving, of Cumberland Gap, is also the author of the poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds (Main Street Rag), as well as editor of Seeking Its Own Level: an anthology of writings about water (MotesBooks). He also serves as editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal, Cutleaf.

James Bogue, photographer

Jonathan Everitt is a poet and freelance writer based in Rochester, N.Y. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in BlazeVox, Scarlet Leaf Review, Small Orange, Impossible Archetype, Ghost City Press, The Bees Are Dead, The Empty Closet, Lake Affect, Le Mot Juste, and the Moving Images poetry anthology, among others. His poem, “Calling Hours,” was the basis for the 2015 short film, Say When. Jonathan has also led a workshop for LGBTQ poets at The Rochester Rainbow Union and co-founded the long-running monthly open mic, New Ground Poetry Night. He earned his MFA in creative writing from Bennington College.