Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

222 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Book Reviews
The author’s talent for poignant expression, which runs throughout
Blue-Tail Fly, is evident in “Walt Whitman Reads to the Limbless,
Dying,” a tribute to poetry’s ability to serve as a salve for the wounded.
Francis applies her own love of words to ease pain and heal distress.
The plea of the wounded to Whitman mirrors the desire of the reader
for more of Vievee Francis’ words in the final lines of this poem:
a poem rolls as a song across his lips,
familiar as the clop of a horse upon brick.
Piece by piece a life is reinvented, as the song
cobbles over closed eyes.
Write for me.
—Reviewed by Patty Dickson Pieczka
Graham, Matthew. A World Without End. Montgomery, AL: River
City Publishing, 2005. 104 pages. $20.00.
Matthew Graham’s third collection, A World Without End, is a book of
loss and lamentation, a book that acknowledges life’s difficult terrain
by looking backward into childhood and forward into mortality. It’s
also a book of history and family, one that chronicles how unsettling
and tenuous the connections between them can be. In these poems,
Graham depicts the details of both small towns and big cities, of the
uncertain negotiations between men and women, and reminds us how
slight the line between human fragility and success is.
The book’s opening section returns readers to Graham’s upstate
New York beginnings, a childhood full of “atomic air raid drills” and
“the wet wool of cloakrooms.” In poems such as “ Still Life with School
Bus” and “First Dance,” we encounter a speaker whose surroundings are
bewildering and fraught with the perils of growing up—“the Shalimar
and taffeta of girl” being chief among them. The most striking poem
in this section is “Two Grandfathers Fighting,” an ode to a certain
stoic male sensibility that is no longer prevalent in our current mediasaturated
culture of reality television and confessional talk shows:
...One grandfather was a dark and silent man,
The other a nasty drunk.