|
|
The Alligator Inventions
Dan Guillory. The Alligator Inventions. Stormline Press
(1992)
ISBN: 0935153144
It is hard to think of a current volume of poems more unified
than Dan Guillory's The Alligator Inventions, which draws
upon the poet's Cajun background and experiences, the history
and folklore of the Louisiana bayou country, and the natural history
of the alligator for its effects.
In the title poem the alligator actually tells his own story,
and there is another piece, "The Water Lizard," in which
the beast is described in the syllabic stanzas and best laboratory-lecture
manner of Marianne Moore.
The second section of the book is composed entirely of letters
from an early Philadelphian, a natural historian who writes home
about the alligators, Indian mounds, Cajuns, and biota of the
bayous. "Jambalaya," a prose memoir of Guillory's grandparents
and his childhood experiences in Louisiana, complements the 27
poems. Guillory writes with uncommon clarity and never indulges
in the kind of special pleading found in many ethnocentric poetry
collections these days, nor are his Cajuns victims in any sense.
Highly recommended, for this and for the depth of experience the
poems convey.
--B.Galvin, Central Connecticut State University
From Library Journal
A scrapbook of Guillory's memories of life in le
pays bays ("the low country") of the Louisiana bayous,
these 27 poems (one in French) and a prose memoir depict his grandparents,
his Uncle Zack, and other Cajuns of his acquaintance. Half Choctaw,
half French, these dispossessed muses of the bayous are presented
with unsentimental, Breughel-like honesty. By relating a frightening
baptismal initiation, when he becomes entangled in a fishing net
and almost drowns, the poet evokes this exotic mixture of wilderness
and civilization: "a compound odor of mud, crayfish, sweat,
and rotting vegetation." The alligator and "slate-blue"
night herons, "totem divinities" of this vanished landscape,
destroyed by off-shore oil drilling, are etched like the graph
of a Richter scale on the imagination. This collection combines
the "chanky chank" of Cajun folk music with the urbane
sadness of George W. Cable's local-color stories of Louisiana.
For public libraries.
-- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
|
