Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 88

MODERN AGE

Louisiana life in the tradition of regional
poetry.
Like Frost writing about New England,
Middleton captures southern Louisiana cul-
ture with electrifying vividness. Like Masters,
Middleton manages to create a veritable com-
munity of personalities, histories, and indi-
vidual stories bound together by the strong
tethers of local community and local identity.
The connection to Masters is particularly
noticeable in one of the most entertaining
sequences in the collection. Middleton has a
deliciously comic homage to Masters's Spoon
River in a brief sequence of poems about
Louisiana Episcopalians entitled "Parishio-
ners: For Bishop Charles Jenkins and Father
John Senette of the Episcopal Diocese of
Louisiana." A vignette of poems with titles
such as "The Wretched Sexton," "The Lay
Rector," "The Yuppie Archdeacon," and
"The New Priest" celebrate life, death, mar-
riage, divorce, love, joy, pain, and ambition
through the perspectives of various members
of a small, and not particularly devout, Loui-
siana Episcopal parish. This poetic vignette
would have surely delighted Edgar Lee Mas-
ters in its regional particularity and emphasis
upon individual personalities.
The Fiddler of Driskill Hill contains poems
of life in southern Louisiana along several
registers and themes, all of which have to do
with continuity, tradition, memory, faith-
the things that make up the fabric of culture.
Deeply moving poems in the volume such
as "The Deep End," "Hand-Me-Downs,"
"Leaving Drexel Street: A Wife's Goodbye,"
"Flies and Grounders," "Black Lake Tales,"
"The Latchkey Child, "and "Mother among
the Graves" reflect upon the transition
between generations and the healing power
of remembering one's kin-mothers, fathers,
sons, cousins, uncles.
Poetry is, to borrow a line from T. S. Eliot,
a mixture of "memory and desire," and
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FALL 2014

Middleton's often very personal poetry helps
one understand the profundity of this phrase
from The Waste Land. Middleton skillfully
transforms familial memories, the major-
ity of which are presumably his own, into
powerful concrete poetic verse-memories
such as learning to swim with his father in
the deep end of the pool, moving his mother
from her home to live with her son (the poet),
and fishing with his uncle.
Even mundane domestic objects such as
hand-me-down clothes are transformed by
Middleton's poetic craft into a window for
perennial wisdom; he writes in "Hand-Me-
Downs" that a family
. . . knows that little's really new,
That most of life's comprised of
hand-me-downs
Someone before us thought or made
or grew,
Then gave or left us like a mother's
gowns

Through these familial images and lessons,
Middleton rehearses through poetry a simple
fact of human existence: we only aspire to be
what we've seen others be. Family ties and
the example of our own kin give us the most
abiding images of how we ought to live, love,
sacrifice, and grow old ourselves.
The troubled and complex racial history
of the South and Louisiana is sensitively and
artfully explored through such poems as
"Song of the Overseer," "The Given World,"
"The Sniper: Last Report from a Louisianian
in Lee's Tigers," and "The Reenactor." These
poems are neither an outright denunciation of
all the South stood for nor an odious roman-
ticizing (overlooking) of the South's legacy
of racial injustice. What is referred to as "the
better dream of Lee and Jefferson" is always
understood through the lens of "Edenic
blends of endlessness and time" or the move-
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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