BOOK REVIEW David Rigsbee reviews Staying Blue by Gibbons Ruark
Steve Myers is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Memory�s Dog (FootHills Publishing, 2004), and a chapbook, Work Site. His poems have recently appeared in various journals, including 5AM, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and The Valparaiso Review. His four-prose-poem sequence �Bloc� won the 2006 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize sponsored by the journal Quarter After Eight. He is Professor of English at DeSales University in Center Valley, PA.
The Arts
Of two ways to a man's heart, the first was supper, hauled up
from the root cellar, one that became the genuine a'dam. Fat
white potatoes, skins on and a little soil still clinging to them,
then beetroot, turnip, parsnip, leek—all manner of tuber
interred in dirt too wet and sullen to nurture an herb—tossed
with vinegar and dropped into an iron pot, then smothered
with garlic cloves and roasted over an open fire, which was
custom until the chimneys went up across Central Europe,
though the arts persisted: string quartets, drama troupes, pencil
sketches. Leather suitcases stuffed with them—moons, nightjars,
locomotives, whole families lined up clasping hands, smiling. And
the women of Ravensbruck, sharing recipes for soups, blintzes,
linzer torte, some of which landed in the hands of their keepers,
who carried them back to their wives in town and enjoyed them
during their Christmas leave, the preparation simple, a few quick
flicks of the kitchen knife, a half-turn of the gascock.
Steve Myers is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Memory�s Dog (FootHills Publishing, 2004), and a chapbook, Work Site. His poems have recently appeared in various journals, including 5AM, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and The Valparaiso Review. His four-prose-poem sequence �Bloc� won the 2006 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize sponsored by the journal Quarter After Eight. He is Professor of English at DeSales University in Center Valley, PA.