Texas Poet Laureate Reflects on Death and Deep Sea Fishing in New and Selected Poems [Book Review]
Huh. Did you realize that our state bestows the honor of Texas Poet Laureate on one individual per year? We do. Or…we sort of do. As this list reveals, sometime around 1982 the Lieutenant Governor and Speaker of the House have slipped in their duties of nomination, and from 1989 to 1999 we had but one poet (Mildred Baass) hold the position. However, we appear to be more or less back on track. Last year Paul Ruffin, a poet as well as both a fiction and non-fiction writer, was awarded the post. Texas Christian University has, for five years running, released collections by the current Texas Poet Laureate, and Paul Ruffin: New and Selected Poems is the latest in the series.
This book has four sections, with each highlighting a different part of Ruffin's career. We begin with poetry from his 1980 book Lighting the Furnace Pilot, continue to Circling (1996), The Book of Boys and Girls (2003) and conclude with nine poems written last year. Ruffin has a straightforward but lyrical approach, and some of the joy of his poetry is found in the combination of a commonsense, wide-eyed approach to the natural world coupled with a playful imagination.
His early poems starkly but not unkindly depict our relationship with the elements and nature. In “Cleaning the Well,” our young protagonist is lowered into the family well to retrieve detritus including “a rubber ball, pine cones, leather glove, beer can, fruit jars, an indefinable bone.” When the boy announces to his grandfather that a skeleton (possibly feline) still sits at the bottom of the well, the older man replies: “You’ve drunk all that cat you’re likely to drink. Forget it, and don’t tell the others. It’s just one more secret you got to live with.” Amen. Many of the other poems delight in less-accidental pleasures of nature’s bounty: we have poems here about deep-sea fishing, “Gigging Frogs,” eating redfish and oysters. It’s a vegetarian’s nightmare, but Ruffin reveals the processes of finding and catching our own dinner can be a contemplative and sacrosanct one.
Like most poets, Ruffin muses on death not infrequently. With “Larry the Lawn Chair Man,” he examines the strange feats and suicide of Larry Walters, an eccentric known for his lawn chair/weather balloon flight in 1982. That’s all well and good, but other poems from 2009 aren’t as successful in bridging the tragic and comic. From offering an unusual explanation for the disappearance for Amelia Earhart (hint: it involves farts), a poem about a man who impregnates a mummy, and a poem entitled “Diver off Florida Coast Sexually Assaulted by 300-Pound Turtle,” Ruffin begins subscribing to an almost goofy, less captivating strand of poetic approach (if there’s a good laugh to be had about sexual assault via turtle, it’s probably not going to end up in a poem).
But back to the good - in “When We Heard the Learned Astronomer Explain the Theory of the Exploding Universe,” (a play on this Walt Whitman poem) the protagonist expresses relief that a lecturing scientist was not “cold, exact,” and, “Instead we sat and heard him tell his story as if he aimed it at the sleeping child on my shoulder, like some sad-eyed boy with a truth that we all should have known:‘The best way I can tell you this is all the bright stars will be gone.’” Simple, exacting, true. At his best, Ruffin exhibits the same qualities with his poetry.
