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Flyover Country
by B.J. Buckley
48 Poems ~ 83 pages
Price: $20.00
Publisher: Pine Row Press
ISBN #: 978-1-963110-08-1
To Order: Pinerow.com
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
Flyover Country is prefaced with words by renowned Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who writes,
We are the landscape of all we have ever seen.
I feature this adage because I sense an affinity between Buckley and Noguchi. Just as Noguchi was comfortable working within a wide scope of genres and artistic materials, B.J. Buckley swims like an Olympian in her native Montana environment. Buckley IS the Montana landscape. Her poems capture the expansive sweep of Montana’s range, its animals and people, its hardships, and rewards.
“Hunger Moon,” opens the collection:
Furred mounds beneath pale quilt of snow–
intricately stitched embroideries of tracks
glass-sharp as frost. Here and there
a savage applique of red.
Bald eagles and a raven shared
this bloody truce with magpie courtiers,
an errant crow. Subzero last night,
sky starred obsidian,
the cold drifts deep:
Coyotes took down starving deer.
Among the enduring qualities of B.J. Buckley’s work is her ability to paint pictures with words. Let’s take a closer look at this portrait of death: the poet, via the imagination, flies over the dark landscape. The snow isn’t mere snow, it is a “quilt,” “stitched” as in a work of “embroidery.” Blood scattered by a coyote attack on a weakened deer becomes an “applique” of red. The sky is so dark Buckley uses the unusual word “obsidian” to bring it out. Obsidian refers to dense, rock-hardness. The event, as dark as dark can get, is laid out like a crime scene, complete with witnesses and accomplices collected, waiting to be interviewed by detectives.
As in a TV action-drama that leads with an attention-getting opening, Flyover Country, offers poem-after-poem of densely lyrical creations designed to display the enduring qualities of Buckley’s image-rich Montana landscape. Consider these compelling titles: “Snow on the Backs of Cattle,” “Apotropaic,” “Instructions for Resurrection,” “Baked Potatoes Late at Night,” and “Watching Horses in First Snow.” These are but a few intriguing titles. No poem disappointed me.
Stylistically, Buckley, is diverse. Her strongest suit is her narrative poems. Lines vary in length from 12 to 15 syllables. They flow conversationally from a life absorbed in the place she loves and with the people she loves. Many poems feature a unique Montana “brogue.” In this sense, she reminds me of James Whitcomb Riley. Take for example this excerpt from “Wind”:
Breeze out here strong enough to blow the hair off a dog!
Curley hadta yell, and we could still barely hear him.
“Huh – so that’s how you get those nekkid little chee-wa-was.”
Curly had two chihuahuas he loved like babies, so he took
a swing at Clay. Missed. We was out trying to fix the windmill
pumped water to the stock tank, cuz without it dead cows
was in our future, and the whole frame come down in the storm
last night like pick-up-sticks, blades on the wheel scattered
across a quarter mile of sage.
Don’t get the idea that Buckley is a “one-trick-pony.” She excels no matter the form: “4 am” displays her facility with rhyme:
Cloud ceiling low,
temperature low,
light an echo
of darkness. No
tracks in the thin snow,
no railroad whistle, no
traffic. No
bird. Turgid blue-black flow
of current along slow
curves of Muddy Creek, rows
of cottonwood, willows
bent in perpetual sorrow.
No sirens, no radio
no voices, the world so
quiet each breath blows
like wind in the body’s low
branches, heart of a borrowed
drum. Blurred shadow,
pine. Owl, mute arrow.
I’m held hostage by the poet’s eerie description of Montana’s night landscape and the owl “whooshing” through the thin night air.
“Corn Dryers” is a free verse poem about corn waiting to be loaded into railroad cars, “Not a soul on the streets / this town so small / the dead outnumber / the living.” The railroad cars sit empty “on the silo spur // the giant come down from the beanstalk and / idling, idling his engines.”
A poem not-to-miss: “Hagendorfer’s Garage”:
Weeds breaking through black asphalt underneath the dirty snow.
Rust, wood shavings, a mess of scrap and stacks of rotting tires,
Decaying cardboard boxes, Valvoline and Shell Oil, redwhiteandblue,
redyellow, the mock-tile aluminum facade with its smart green stripe,
windows miraculously intact and caked in dust, gas pumps alien
in their shapes, avatars of another century, air hose as empty as
the shed skin of a snake.
As the poem continues Buckley paints a picture of “Hag,” who had a rough life but one decorated with a heart full of kindness, who made coffee “that could peel paint.”
B.J. Buckley is a poet for the people, for the people who live the hardscrabble life that, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, become the “stuff” of award-winning poetry.
Five stars for Flyover Country, underpriced at $20.00.
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