Melancholic Fantasia in the Tradition of the Lonely Swamp Pop
by Lee Rossi
Berceuse Parish
Burnside Soleil
Texas Review Press
From the wild anachronism of its cover page, through poems and commentary penned by different personae all the way to the elegiac but uplifting finale, Burnside Soleil’s Berceuse Parish is a delight for every reader who values the American language’s multiplicity of regions and registers.
Now I’m a sucker for long titles (poems & books), such that Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (published in 2000) will often come to me in the middle of a sleepless night—but when I encountered the title page of Burnside Soleil’s debut collection, I was floored, not to say speechless. Somewhere in the middle of the cover (filled with typescript from top to bottom) one encounters the following declaration: “A Melancholic Fantasia in the Tradition of the Lonely Swamp Pop, a Collage of the Culture & Peculiar History of Our Parish as Figured in the Tragicomic Soleil Family.” Not the Cirque du Soleil, but close—we stand warned that we are no longer in the well-tended precincts of the Academy of American Poets or the Poetry Society of America.
According to its “curatorial narrator,” one Auguste “Gus” Babineaux, Berceuse Parish, “located between a bayou and a river,” is, an undistinguished place; “like most settlements in the South {it] is vexed by a history that has little to salvage.” And yet it has been a multicultural Eden, tilled by “subsistence farmers who lived often enough in collaboration, not conflict, with les indigènes, espagnols, français, gens de couleur libres, et al.”
Scattered throughout the book are M. Babineaux’s prose vignettes which detail the history, geography & personages of this liminal space. In addition, we encounter numerous poetic excursions, the work of Burnside, “poet (a bit orphic).”
We also find epistolary exchanges (transformed into broken sonnets à la Robert Lowell) from Burnside’s wayward and warring parents, Penelope (aka “Penny, mother (astray)” and Uless, “no-good father (lost).” Mythic territory, no doubt, somewhere south of Homer and James Joyce.
And, so as to make sure the reader apprehends the good-humored irony underlying this communal portrait, we get a newspaper clipping, “Dead Snake Culprits at Large” (I reproduce it in whole.):
At approximately 2:00 pm on April 25, two boys
dropped a snake corpse on Lester Voisin and Stephen
Blanchard. This occurred at Berceuse Bridge where the
victims were rowing their boat.
It is believed these boys also stole a bucket of
tomatoes from Teresa Blanco.
Parents are advised to bring up their boys in the
ways of the Lord.
If anyone has any information, please contact the
authorities.
Despite the out-of-the-wayness of the place, both narrator and poet are keen to undermine received notions of rurality. Yes, the inhabitants live close to nature, but they do so with a multi-faceted intelligence. In “Imani,” the poet recounts a typical conversation with a departed friend:
You would tell me about Ulmus alata and the moths
notched on its twigs. You liked the particular.
I would tell you about the bark cracking the sidewalk,
how a thing can look like a noise.
Here we are given two ways of appreciating the world, one scientific and classificatory, the other imaginative, both at ease with the other.
“Poet” and “narrator” are both equally keen to dispel received notions about “cadiens” (i.e. Cajuns, French settlers displaced from Canada by the British). In “A Few Particulars on Courtship”: Gus displays undisguised disdain for “stereotypes of lazy, illiterate Francophones contrasted with assiduous and enterprising Anglophones,” what he calls “cultural kitsch.” Cajuns are not lazy and illiterate, he assures us. “Do you think we know only swamps, not the mountains and rivers and snow?” he asks scornfully. “Read a book.”
Anchoring its history and cultural criticism, the book portrays an often somber communal life. After the poet’s parents leave the area and their children, Burnside and his sister Maggie are raised by grandparents, his cousins Nel and Micah part of this extended and haphazard family. Later his sister also leaves but returns with a child. The poet eventually marries (twice), finds love and fathers children of his own (two surprises). The poems whisper to friends and family members, sharing secrets of their lives together. Given all the broken bonds, death and separation, small wonder that the book resonates a profound sadness. In “Marcel” the poet recalls walking with his son and finding mulberries, which “bloodied the sidewalk”:
My son--
he gathered in his small hands the fruit
fermenting, this wild sweet melt
Sweetness yes, but the sweetness of decay. A note that is amplified later in the poem by an anecdote told by the poet’s father, who
once told me a lightning bolt singed
the heartwood and pith like a wick.
He blanketed the little fires charring
the sapwood. There were no birds
on the snag for weeks,
None of the characters in this book escape life’s lightning; all are struck to the heartwood.
Life is tough in this fallen world but filled with beauty, which quickens the poet’s lyrical impulse. We encounter it variously and in flashes, as for instance in “Jeremy,” a poem addressed to a “wayward” friend:
Time is rain in these trees,
the wrens pitched after lace bugs,
this feast of golden scales.
“Gus,” our narrator, describes this book an “epic of fragments.” There’s a story—actually, there are many stories. But there are also many leaps, from vignette to essay to rhapsody, the overall progress being from alienation and loss to a kind of reconciliation and acceptance.
In “A Few Particulars on Purgatorio” “Gus” recounts the reconciliation of Uless with his children. Here, for instance, we see the son sitting with his father in a mountain cabin: “There would be a story, usually, something preposterous, and our poet would listen, and there was warmth, and there was drink, and there may have been forgiveness. It wasn’t love, but like love, and enough.”
It wasn’t love, but something like love, love adjacent, the way Purgatory is an outpost on the way to heaven. “Gus” calls this book a tale of fathers who left, offering those wayward personages not grace or forgiveness but something else, what Gus names “Spring.” In “A Few Particulars,” the book’s last piece, he offers a final anecdote which might be taken as a summary of the whole:
One evening, we [Gus and his father] marveled at the clouds, silent and then suddenly luminous. We had been riding in his red truck. My dad said it’s not real,
heat lightning. It’s a myth that temperature could crackle with light. But it’s pretty, prettier than the truth, he said. A good story.
I keep telling it.
It is a good story that “Gus” tells, which along with the other good stories in Berceuse Parish are sure to fill the hearts and minds of its readers with light and delight.
Burnside Soleil
Texas Review Press
From the wild anachronism of its cover page, through poems and commentary penned by different personae all the way to the elegiac but uplifting finale, Burnside Soleil’s Berceuse Parish is a delight for every reader who values the American language’s multiplicity of regions and registers.
Now I’m a sucker for long titles (poems & books), such that Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (published in 2000) will often come to me in the middle of a sleepless night—but when I encountered the title page of Burnside Soleil’s debut collection, I was floored, not to say speechless. Somewhere in the middle of the cover (filled with typescript from top to bottom) one encounters the following declaration: “A Melancholic Fantasia in the Tradition of the Lonely Swamp Pop, a Collage of the Culture & Peculiar History of Our Parish as Figured in the Tragicomic Soleil Family.” Not the Cirque du Soleil, but close—we stand warned that we are no longer in the well-tended precincts of the Academy of American Poets or the Poetry Society of America.
According to its “curatorial narrator,” one Auguste “Gus” Babineaux, Berceuse Parish, “located between a bayou and a river,” is, an undistinguished place; “like most settlements in the South {it] is vexed by a history that has little to salvage.” And yet it has been a multicultural Eden, tilled by “subsistence farmers who lived often enough in collaboration, not conflict, with les indigènes, espagnols, français, gens de couleur libres, et al.”
Scattered throughout the book are M. Babineaux’s prose vignettes which detail the history, geography & personages of this liminal space. In addition, we encounter numerous poetic excursions, the work of Burnside, “poet (a bit orphic).”
We also find epistolary exchanges (transformed into broken sonnets à la Robert Lowell) from Burnside’s wayward and warring parents, Penelope (aka “Penny, mother (astray)” and Uless, “no-good father (lost).” Mythic territory, no doubt, somewhere south of Homer and James Joyce.
And, so as to make sure the reader apprehends the good-humored irony underlying this communal portrait, we get a newspaper clipping, “Dead Snake Culprits at Large” (I reproduce it in whole.):
At approximately 2:00 pm on April 25, two boys
dropped a snake corpse on Lester Voisin and Stephen
Blanchard. This occurred at Berceuse Bridge where the
victims were rowing their boat.
It is believed these boys also stole a bucket of
tomatoes from Teresa Blanco.
Parents are advised to bring up their boys in the
ways of the Lord.
If anyone has any information, please contact the
authorities.
Despite the out-of-the-wayness of the place, both narrator and poet are keen to undermine received notions of rurality. Yes, the inhabitants live close to nature, but they do so with a multi-faceted intelligence. In “Imani,” the poet recounts a typical conversation with a departed friend:
You would tell me about Ulmus alata and the moths
notched on its twigs. You liked the particular.
I would tell you about the bark cracking the sidewalk,
how a thing can look like a noise.
Here we are given two ways of appreciating the world, one scientific and classificatory, the other imaginative, both at ease with the other.
“Poet” and “narrator” are both equally keen to dispel received notions about “cadiens” (i.e. Cajuns, French settlers displaced from Canada by the British). In “A Few Particulars on Courtship”: Gus displays undisguised disdain for “stereotypes of lazy, illiterate Francophones contrasted with assiduous and enterprising Anglophones,” what he calls “cultural kitsch.” Cajuns are not lazy and illiterate, he assures us. “Do you think we know only swamps, not the mountains and rivers and snow?” he asks scornfully. “Read a book.”
Anchoring its history and cultural criticism, the book portrays an often somber communal life. After the poet’s parents leave the area and their children, Burnside and his sister Maggie are raised by grandparents, his cousins Nel and Micah part of this extended and haphazard family. Later his sister also leaves but returns with a child. The poet eventually marries (twice), finds love and fathers children of his own (two surprises). The poems whisper to friends and family members, sharing secrets of their lives together. Given all the broken bonds, death and separation, small wonder that the book resonates a profound sadness. In “Marcel” the poet recalls walking with his son and finding mulberries, which “bloodied the sidewalk”:
My son--
he gathered in his small hands the fruit
fermenting, this wild sweet melt
Sweetness yes, but the sweetness of decay. A note that is amplified later in the poem by an anecdote told by the poet’s father, who
once told me a lightning bolt singed
the heartwood and pith like a wick.
He blanketed the little fires charring
the sapwood. There were no birds
on the snag for weeks,
None of the characters in this book escape life’s lightning; all are struck to the heartwood.
Life is tough in this fallen world but filled with beauty, which quickens the poet’s lyrical impulse. We encounter it variously and in flashes, as for instance in “Jeremy,” a poem addressed to a “wayward” friend:
Time is rain in these trees,
the wrens pitched after lace bugs,
this feast of golden scales.
“Gus,” our narrator, describes this book an “epic of fragments.” There’s a story—actually, there are many stories. But there are also many leaps, from vignette to essay to rhapsody, the overall progress being from alienation and loss to a kind of reconciliation and acceptance.
In “A Few Particulars on Purgatorio” “Gus” recounts the reconciliation of Uless with his children. Here, for instance, we see the son sitting with his father in a mountain cabin: “There would be a story, usually, something preposterous, and our poet would listen, and there was warmth, and there was drink, and there may have been forgiveness. It wasn’t love, but like love, and enough.”
It wasn’t love, but something like love, love adjacent, the way Purgatory is an outpost on the way to heaven. “Gus” calls this book a tale of fathers who left, offering those wayward personages not grace or forgiveness but something else, what Gus names “Spring.” In “A Few Particulars,” the book’s last piece, he offers a final anecdote which might be taken as a summary of the whole:
One evening, we [Gus and his father] marveled at the clouds, silent and then suddenly luminous. We had been riding in his red truck. My dad said it’s not real,
heat lightning. It’s a myth that temperature could crackle with light. But it’s pretty, prettier than the truth, he said. A good story.
I keep telling it.
It is a good story that “Gus” tells, which along with the other good stories in Berceuse Parish are sure to fill the hearts and minds of its readers with light and delight.
Lee Rossi is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Say Anything, from Plain View Press, and has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Don’t Leave Hungry: 50 Years of Southern Poetry Review and Grand Passion: The Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond.
His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Southern Review and The Harvard Review. He has published reviews in The Los Angeles Review, Rain Taxi, and Pedestal. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Southern Review and The Harvard Review. He has published reviews in The Los Angeles Review, Rain Taxi, and Pedestal. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
