Talking Burley
by Sherry
Chandler
Main
Street Rag, 2019
ISBN:
978-1-58848-721-2
81
pages
__________
The following biography is from Main
Street Rag Publishing’s website:
Sherry Chandler grew up in the
hills near the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers, where her family
farmed burley tobacco for generations. Talking Burley is
her third full-length book of poems. Her work has received several awards,
including the Betty Gabehart, the Kudzu magazine
prize, the Joy Bale Boone Prize, and the Editor’s Choice Award from Waypoints. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, three
times for a Pushcart Prize, she has received financial support from the
Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She lives on a
small Kentucky farm.”
I first met Sherry Chandler around
ten years ago at a reading and panel discussion held as part of the Kentucky
Women Writers Conference in Lexington, Kentucky. I’ve
enjoyed her poetry collections Weaving A New Eden (2011) and The Woodcarver's Wife (2014) which I reviewed
and interviewed
her for. Last year I was lucky enough to read with her and Leatha Kendrick
at River Valley Winery in Carrollton, Kentucky. Sherry has a website at: http://www.sherrychandler.com/.
—Karen
L. George
__________
Review of Sherry
Chandler’s Talking Burley
Sherry Chandler's Talking Burley examines the hardships
and traumas of farming and consuming tobacco, along with aspects of the industry’s
troubling history, woven with personal memories of growing up in that complex world.
The poems intricately braid cultural and social history of Kentucky and the nation,
delving into subjects such as illness, loss, strained relationships, war, debt,
and greed contrasted against moments of beauty, wonder, reverence, and
tenderness. She roots her poems in concrete, sensory
detail, particularly of the natural world, quickened by humor and wit rubbing
up against clear-sighted seriousness.
The first poem of collection, "Cigarettes,"
sets the stage for the book with a stark, honest account of her own history
with cigarettes:
I
smoked them.
I
smoked them because I was married at 17 and divorced at 23.
I
smoked them because, when I heard the pistol, one shot in the dark,
I felt nothing. There was
nothing.
…
I
smoked them pregnant.
I
sucked on them while my baby suckled on me.
…
I
smoked them at a quarter a pack, at half dollar a pack, at a dollar a
pack.
I smoked them through vows I wouldn’t pay more.
I
paid more.
The repetition suggests the power of
the cigarette addiction alongside the narrator’s feeling of helplessness to
give them up. The poem goes on to say she smoked them when her “mother-in-law died
of lung cancer,” and when her father smoked while wearing oxygen, ending with the
emotionally intense lines:
I
quit them.
I
sat on the kitchen stool and I hugged myself. I hugged myself and I
rocked myself. I rocked myself and I screamed.
In “Founding Principles,” she talks
about our nation’s shameful history, how it was “built by slaves,” how the top
of the Capitol’s columns is decorated with tobacco leaves, as are school rings.
The poem ends with the acknowledgement of our troubling, complicated history,
with a striking contrast of light and dark images:
We
re a city on a hill
We
are a thousand points of light
We
are burning crosses.
Several poems examine the tobacco wars of
the early 1900’s in Western Kentucky and Tennessee. Because the American Tobacco Company priced tobacco so low that farmers couldn’t
make any profit from it, the Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky and
Tennessee (called PPA) was formed. The Night Riders, a militant group of the PPA,
began to attack farms of growers who did not support the PPA—destroying tobacco
crops, buildings, machinery, and attacking individuals.
The poem “Pearl
Wilhoit” describes Night Riders in Hopkinsville, Kentucky that “destroyed
property valued at over $200,000.” In “The Night Rider,” written from the point-of-view
of one of the Night Riders, the state of Kentucky’s motto is praised, “United we
stand, divided we fall,” urging all tobacco growers to join the PPA and boycott
the monopoly of the American Tobacco
Company:
Time to teach your old squirrel gun
some new tricks. If those hillbilly holdouts
take Duke’s bribe, if they don’t pledge
their tobacco to the pool,
we’ll all fall.
The ones who won’t starve with us,
we won’t let them fatten against us.
The poem “How to Lose the Family Farm” lists incremental
ways such a loss can occur, starting with such things as war; or when you’re forced
to borrow against the crop so you can have enough money to grow it; or recessions
and depressions. The poem lists other ways, repeating the same sentence structure,
emphasizing the escalating manner of this plight:
Start
when the Night Riders call you hillbilly, scrape your plant beds,
burn
your barn in the name of solidarity.
Start
when you join the Night Riders, become the enforcer, so you don’t
have
to watch your children starve.
Start
when the juggernaut of agribusiness runs you down, when the
American
Tobacco Company swallows up all competition for your
money
crop.
Start with having
a money crop, all those eggs and only one basket.
The above stanzas convey the sense
of defeat those tobacco growers must have felt. While reading these poems, I
noticed how timely they felt, though placed in the past, because unfortunately
they point out a sad truth still present in today’s world—that money and big
business control everything.
The poem “Smoke Rings” powerfully conveys
how tobacco provided many things, not all wanted:
Tobacco
(dip chews at jawbone, teeth, and tongue) buys
life
insurance, health insurance, chemotherapy
Tobacco
(allotments laced with chemicals grow steroidal crops)
crop
my sister raised bought her first piano and necessary lessons
Tobacco
(smoke fills the organs of breath with carbon monoxide)
tithes
bought the organ my sister plays on Sundays, hymns ruined
lungs
can’t sing to save their souls
The poem also alludes to the child
labor practice rampant on the tobacco farms. In a note to this poem, the author
references a 2011 article by Sarah Bosely in The Guardian, which “estimates
that there were 1.3 million [children working in tobacco fields] worldwide under
the age of 14”:
Tobacco farmers’ sons (unschooled) schooled
in tobacco culture
paid
the taxes, built the schools
Many of Chandler’s poems recount
memories of her time growing up on a tobacco-growing farm. In “Fires at Night,”
she’s reminded of a fire “sixty years ago” when they burned tobacco plant beds “to
sterilize the ground, / ready it to receive seeds small as the dot / at the end
of this sentence.” Such a beautiful image of hope—life rising from the ashes.
In the collection’s title poem, “Talking
Burley,” she speaks about the “Mysteries of language,” that tobacco had its own
vocabulary, how “we spoke, our broad a’s and flat i’s / made a job of a jab,
turned a harrow to a hire, / ware to wire, and wire itself to wahr,” and how cured
tobacco was arranged “into ordered piles / / we called books.”
She gives examples of her part in
the family’s tobacco growing in “To Set Tobacco with the Season,” where you
need: “a nine-year-old / granddaughter / willing to drop / the seedlings along
/ the laid-off rows.” In “The Jobber” she and her cousin assist Uncle James and
her big sister in the planting process:
Uncle
James shouts water boy! And me
and
my cousin take off with our lard
buckets
full. The bucket bail
bites
my palm, sweat bees sting the bend
of
my knees. When I cry, Uncle James says
sweat
bees only sting lazy people.
Many poems are alive with images of
the natural world. In “Cicadas” she expresses their sound so exquisitely as “a
conch-shell swell and fall…as if holding to ear a humpbacked larval husk / to
hear the shimmer of the earth’s pulse.” She has poems about horseflies, tobacco
worms, “soft as baby hair, / vulnerable / as exposed gut,” and grasshoppers who
“bet / their lives on the thrust of their long / hind legs.” In “Grasshopper”
we see her delightful sense of humor and wit:
A
tobacco worm is soft as a Quaker.
A grasshopper is hard-shelled as a Baptist.
**
This poet apologizes to the Quakers.
**
Take a July walk
down the farm road
just to look over your tobacco,
a sizzling scatter of grasshoppers
will mark your progress
like a child’s sparkler
shedding stars.
What a lovely image to end the poem,
creating a pleasing sense of awe, along with the marvelous onomatopoeic line: “a
sizzling scatter of grasshoppers.”
The poem “Thurston” opens with a
beautiful description of a creek:
A
thing of roots and mud, the high bank smells
of
fish, rotten sycamore leaves, the rank horseweeds,
growing
thick as a stockade wall along this deep hole
where
a grown man might wade up to his neck
in
murky water.
In the poem “Rivers” she relates a
memory and the poet’s deep connection to the natural world. It opens with rich
imagery of sight, sound, scent, and motion:
Smells of early morning rivers
lap at memory in small
wind-driven waves, slap
against a plywood boat.
I love how it gives a heron and
three buzzards equal footing in the next stanza, creating a gorgeous image of
the buzzards:
Dragging
its legs, a heron
takes
flight. Three buzzards
on
a snag open prayer-book
wings
to greet the dawn.
The poem ends with a stanza of family
with her in the boat, and how they are intricately braided:
Daddy’s
rumbling
volcano
voice,
his
cigarette smoke,
my
brother’s chuckle,
all
helix-entwined
in
my watery cells.
Those last two lines are so powerful,
suggesting the spiral chain of DNA contains shared memory (genetic memory), and
the idea that memories are held in your body at the cellular level.
Many of the poems examine memories
and various ideas of legacy. In “The Barn or Housing Kentucky Burley,” where the
Kentucky burley hung to dry, is now a place where “a wake of turkey vultures
roosts / in the ruin, nesting on rafters forty feet // above the ground.”
In “Legacy North,” the poet speaks
of, and to, her Grandfather Christoph, who emigrated from Silesia:
For
all I know Silesia is all vampires and werewolves,
Like
Kentucky is all creationists and toothless meth cooks.
Like
Kentucky, it’s a backwater.
Like
Kentucky, it’s known for mountains and cursed with coal.
Further in the poem, she again brings
up her family’s, Kentucky’s and our nation’s complicated history: “I am from
those enslaved. // I am from those who enslaved others.”
Several poems present her family history
through the gaze of old photographs. In “Chandler Brothers, 1936” her father, “bent
under the propped-up hood” of a “broken-down Buick,” “is a shadow obscured by
deeper shadows.” Her Uncle James, “his body half out of the frame, / cud in his
jaw…looking back to confront the camera.” The poem, “Father and Children in
Sepia, 1937,” opens with a question as to what her sister is “looking at, off
to the right,” and closes with that same sister “ready to run / to whatever it
is that’s out of the frame.”
Music threads through many of the
poems. In “Rhapsody in Common Time, Episode 1,” she tells of a grandfather who
plays the mandolin. “Rhapsody in Common Time, Episode 2” describes a great-grandfather
as follows: “to survive a 19th century amputation, / chugged
straight bourbon anesthetic, / his bone bisected by a bona fide sawbones / as
he lay on the kitchen table singing.”
The poems that explore the complexity
of a troubled Kentucky and U.S. history are echoed in the personal history poems
about difficult relationships. In “No Last Words” she writes of her father
dying:
“…in those struggling months I
learned that old
and breathless men are not thereby
made mild.
Those wasted stringy muscles hold
the imprint of a power, a will both
wild
and ordinary, strength enough to
punch
a nurse.
The poem goes on to reveal she wasn’t
present when he died, and there was “No chance for deathbed drama, no chance to
say / what we would not have said, our softer fealty/sealed in a steel-gray coffin, a
church-yard grave.” There is such emotional intensity in the ending stanzas:
No
chance to overwrite the day I failed
a
father stripped and strapped to a plastic chair
without
a sheet or curtain to hide his frailty,
the
day I learned love can be trumped by fear,
that
I had no resources that could tame
the
alien eloquence of his hate-filled stare,
and
since I could not speak to him of shame,
I
don’t remember that we spoke again.
There is such power in the phrase,
the image of “the alien eloquence of his
hate-filled stare,” through the odd pairing of “alien” and “eloquence,” along
with the seeming contradiction of a “hate-filled stare” being “eloquent.” This complexity
and duality of the phrase perfectly mirrors their fraught relationship. In “Little
Man,” she talks about several generations of men (son, grandson), her husband (“my
engendering lover is now the Old Man.”), and her father described as:
…my
smoking, drinking, roofbeam-walking,
mean-as-hell
one-and-only-father,
who
would not have said those two words, [Little Man]
but
taught his sons what he knew:
to
build a barn plumb and never show fear
The poem “Lost” contains another memory
of the time her mother lost her solitaire ring down the drain. She says, “Daddy
offered / the diamond with his promise of good behavior / after twenty-five turbulent
years.” The poem ends with her musing:
…I
like to think the ring washed
all
the way out onto the hillside slick, that it remains,
claimed
by clay and sod, leached like greasy water,
an
emblem of her union with the man, the house,
the
ridge, and me, the child that hard clay bred.
The poem “Resolved” feels as if it’s
set in the present day, resolving the past. It begins “This year let us
hear our whispering better angels. / This year let us see from a more forgiving
angle…” Then the poem shifts into a past memory:
When
I was a child I’d hang from my father’s boat,
up
to my ears in the river. While he ran his trot
line, I listened to the grunting speech of carp
and buffalo,
he
song the river sang when the sun was low.
The poem ends with evocative images
and again the wish to let go of what we can’t resolve, and a desire to see
things in a different, kinder light:
How
easy it was, at nine or ten, to float
along
the plane between, neither in nor out.
This
year let us cut the knots we can’t untangle.
This
year let us see from a more forgiving angle.
The last poem in the book, “The
Monster Opens its Eyes While the Closing Credits Roll” takes place squarely in
the present, speaking of a man who only ever wanted “a farm and a family,” who “expects
to prove himself. Like his father / and his grandfathers, he wants to be / what
he knows how to be: a good tobacco man.” The poem, and the book, ends with the
following stanza:
For
setting, housing, he hires brown-skinned
immigrants he calls Mexican. Who
cares
how
many borders the fake news says they’ve crossed
or
why –no one else will work like slaves
in
August heat at wages he can almost afford.
Not
slaves, no chain gangs, no coiled whips
or
shot guns. The bottom line: he has to
have
cheap
labor. Tobacco is making a comeback.
These lines echo this legacy of the
hard life and the dilemmas faced, of the tobacco grower now and in the past, as
examined throughout this book. They also suggest to me that this hope for a
tobacco comeback is in reality a false hope, which mirrors the idea of bringing
back coal—a newer, clean coal—just one of the false promises made during
the campaign of our current president.
The poems in Sherry Chandler's Talking Burley capture tobacco farming, culture,
and industry of the past that factored into forming our nation, seen through
the eyes of various people who experienced it. She brings our country’s,
Kentucky’s and her personal history alive through clear-eyed examination peppered
with wit and humor. These poems are infused with multi-layered rhythm, imagery,
and emotional depth, unflinching in their honesty and vulnerability, instilled with
tenderness, longing, and a reverence for the land and our connections to it and
our ancestors.
__________
Here are links to some of Sherry Chandler’s poems:
If you want to hear Sherry Chandler talk about
her book “Talking Burley,” listen to this interview on Katerina Stoykova’s Accents,
A Radio Show for Literature, Art and Culture.
Karen George retired from computer programming to write full-time. She lives
in Florence, Kentucky, enjoys photography and visiting forests, museums, cemeteries, historic towns, and bodies of
water.
She is author of five chapbooks, most recently the
collaborative ekphrastic Frame and Mount the Sky (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and two poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim
Your Way Back (2014) and A
Map and One Year (2018). You can find
her work in The
Ekphrastic Review, Heron
Tree, Valparaiso
Poetry Review,
Juniper,
Thimble
Magazine, South Broadway Ghost Society, and Gyroscope Review.
She
holds an MFA from Spalding University, and is co-founder and fiction editor of
the journal, Waypoints. Visit her website
at: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.