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

Book Reviews
his cronies roam the Appalachians looking for vines by which they
can swing across the valley. The boys pile on the end of the line to test
the vine’s strength before the fateful flights, hanging “like so much
bait.” Now confident, they take turns sky walking, “lording it over the
valley…the planet spinning drunkenly under us.” Themes of strength
and power resonate with lines like “moonstruck summer of ’69” and
“an astronaut at apogee,” bringing to mind the lunar leaps of Aldrin
and Armstrong. The poem moves in wider arcs still, bridging American
aeronautics with ancient allegories. Soon, McFee continues, “the earth
forgotten …something went very wrong in the canopy / far above and
behind me: the vine had pulled free / my lifeline had gone slack.” It’s as
if McFee is reminding us of the dangers of soaring too high, a caution
echoing from the story of Icarus. Starting from his personal memory,
then, McFee is able to comment on late twentieth-century hubris while
simultaneously reinvigorating a timeworn myth. This ability to marry
the ancient and modern within the poetry of his own history is one of
the most satisfying qualities of McFee’s recent volume.
But perhaps my favorite aspect of Shinemaster is the way in which
his poems reveal a writer in tune with not only the timeless, but also the
timely; as such, readers interested in insights afforded by recent literary
theory will find much to appreciate. In “The Nudists,” for instance,
McFee mentions “emigrants from the Empire of the Clothed.” Moral
and cultural colonization can be seen in “Mrs. Rembrandt,” a poem
about a neighborhood “artsy lady” who would always complete the
children’s neophyte sketches. Perhaps, McFee writes, she was afraid of
the unwashed reality, preferring, instead, “an idealized version” of the
“dull . . . subjects . . . [who were] like us, only better.”
The most direct connection with postcolonial theory is “Plenty,”
a poem that explores the production of vegetables, history, memory,
and illusion. McFee opens the volume with this poem and it is easy to
see why. This poem moves from a “battered pickup’s bed” to “Spanish
explorers, just home from the New World” to “Henry VIII gorging
himself on sweet potatoes” because of their touted aphrodisiacal
powers. The poem then follows the potato underground where it
“banks its glowing coal” until harvest. The intricacy of produce,
conquest, lineage, fertility, sterility, fable, and hunger reveal a poet
who has not ignored the critical currents around him.
Shinemaster provides further evidence of a poet who plumbs the
deeps of his history to tell us of our own. Themes of history, personal
and public, are interwoven with sex, death, self-creation, and creation
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