Once Upon a SmallTown Time: Poems of America's Heartland,Used

Product Description Poetry. "As the title of this collection suggests, the poems in Louis Daniel Brodsky's ONCE UPON A SMALLTOWN TIME have a soothing sort of lullaby quality characteristic of bedtime tales. Conceived as a metaphoric road trip through three Midwestern towns and across a quarter century, the poems are steeped in an uplifting nostalgia, but without the cloying sentimentality. The observations are fond, even wistful, but never anything but fair and clear and unexaggerated in their effect"Charles Rammelkamp. Review As the title of this collection suggests, the poems in Louis Daniel Brodsky'sOnce upon a SmallTown Time have a soothing sort of lullaby quality characteristic of bedtime tales. Conceived as a metaphoric road trip through three Midwestern towns and across a quarter century, the poems are steeped in an uplifting nostalgia, but without the cloying sentimentality. The observations are fond, even wistful, but never anything but fair and clear and unexaggerated in their effect. Brodsky drives us through the dying Missouri town of Tipton, a onceprosperous railroad town eclipsed by a changing economy but whose charm lies precisely in its resistance to "progress," in the serenity of its silence and motionlessness. We eavesdrop on the townsfolk in the cafe as they gossip about their neighbors, watch the Amish in their defiance of modernity, witness the heritage of a onceproud house auctioned off as junk. Brodsky drives us to "the square" in Jacksonville, and from his perch in the flower shop, shows us its shabby replica of Liberty in the town green slowly going to seed; we see a parade wending its way through town, before an Illinois College football game. Finally, he shows us Farmington, Missouri, as a family grows over a span of two decades, only to leave, tearing its heart. Memory is no less potent a driver of these poems, collecting and spewing recollections of bygone triumphs. If it's not the glories of the dying railroad town, with its memories of the presidential train coming through, its oncebooming trouser factory whose exoskeleton stands as a monument to the town's past splendor, or the wornout replica of Liberty in the fading town square, the remembrance is more poignantly of a family's inception and development in and departure from the heartbreaking innocence of rural America. The birth of a son, contrasted with the death of a neighbor, is especially affecting in capturing the tender cruelties of time. Brodsky's diction is full of lush Faulknerian imagery. He captures the bleak calm, the anonymous serenity and the evanescent odors of modest Midwestern towns throughout their seasons. Like a tour guide, "Traveling this desolate road / One strophe, measure, foot at a time, / On [the] way from poem, home, to poem again," Brodsky not only shows us the Midwest, but allows us to feel it as well. Charles Rammelkamp, author of The Secretkeepers and The Book of Life About the Author Louis Daniel Brodsky is the author of sixtythree volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Editions Gallimard) and twentyfour volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and eight books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, Faulkner Journal, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.