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By John Zheng
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Many writers’ works convey a sense of place imbued with their personal experiences significant to others. The place that has been rooted in their heart and soul nurtures their creative curiosity and imagination. Bruce Lowry is a poet whose curiosity always brings him back to his homeplace in the South. His poetry collection, Salvage, conveys a strong sense of place with his experience significant both to him and others.
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The sense of place, as said by Eudora Welty in “Place in Fiction,” “is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind; surely they are somewhere related. it is by knowing where you stand that you grow able to judge where you are. Place absorbs our earliest notice and attention, it bestows on us our original awareness…” (54). Lowry’s original awareness of the place that draws him to write about is his homeplace in Louisiana which often comes to his memory as vividly as he describes in “Bayou”:
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Drown me in your waters, murky
and black, that marsh where my father
baited hooks with night crawler and catalpa.
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Hand me back your vaulted sky,
bream, white perch, the knob-
kneed cypress under hanging moss.
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Bring back my father of those sober
Saturdays, egg salad in one hand,
my snagged line in the other,
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his shoulders sagging like the long limbs
beneath the weight of things.
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And bring back the last bend
where we’d lay down our poles,
paddle through the thin oak,
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Coleman box of fish between us,
bait exhausted, our arms burned by the sun,
our laughter so easy then,
at home in the green and the brown.
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The poem chooses the bayou in the South as a setting to highlight a time when the boy went fishing with his father. In the beginning, the speaker is eager to be drowned in the memory of the “murky and black” marsh with the vaulted sky overhead so he can reminisce about those Saturdays learning to fish with his father. Line after line of images vivify the scene and bring back those old days of laughing together. In writing “Bayou,” Lowry must have two pictures in his mind, one is his boyhood experience, and the other is something beyond the bayou—how his personal experience has a universal significance and how his description of the father and the relationship between father and son strikes a chord in others’ imagination. Lowry’s description of the father and the son brings back to mind “My Father’s Love Letters,” a poem focused on the father-son relationship by Yusef Komunyakaa, who is also a poet from Louisiana.
Lowry’s sense of place also revives a shooting he did in boyhood, as confessed in “I Shot a Robin Once”: “I fired the pellet, took a breath, / watched her fall from the great oak // for the very reason / I could think of none at all.” Another poem “Rialto Theater, 1964” records a coming-of-age awareness of segregation in the South. The little boy wonders when he sees the word colored in the theater:
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The man in the gray
polyester slacks
makes his way
slowly up the backstairs.
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I hold my father’s
hand, wonder what
the word colored means.
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The man’s back is straight,
the heels
of his shoes
ride heavy on the steps.
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My father leans down to me like a priest
and tells me—balcony is
a place we never go.
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This situation shows that segregation was persistent in the South even in the year 1964 when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to forbid discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The implications made by Lowry, though through the boy’s eyes, are the dignity in the image of the man’s straight back as well as the indignation expressed by riding the heavy steps on the backstairs. The comparison of the father’s leaning to a priest carries an ironic tone that even religion has its prejudice.
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There is no doubt that Lowry’s sense of place takes him elsewhere, to his second home in New Jersey or other places like the Cape, Portland on the West Coast, and Chinatown. Yet, views gained elsewhere still bring him back to the old days in the South. “Six O’clock on the Cape,” for example, compares everything that gets wet and dries on the Cape to the insides of his “mother’s shoes / after her days sewing cushions.” His visit to Chinatown in “Year of the Dragon” to see lanterns, fireworks, and parades reminds him of a brief encounter with a girl who was “part Choctaw and had brown eyes, as confessed in these lines:
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The last time I saw Year of the Dragon
was high school, the broken down
Rialto with a girl
From newspaper staff.
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South, like a magnet, always pulls Lowry to its side. In his heart, the sense of place is deeply rooted in his birthplace, his home in Louisiana, as expressed dearly in these two stanzas of “Choice”:
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If I have a choice
I’ll remember my mother in her
work clothes
with her Sanka
and cigarettes
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bent towards the kitchen window
before she heads out the door
into dark morning
into the old hand of day.
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Lowry’s Salvage is a collection of poems about places. His writing is honest, echoing what Welty says; his voice is honest with memories and experiences that taste luckily like rice or leftover cornbread his mother fed him when he was a little child, as related in “Leftover Cornbread.” In short, his sense of place is the sun porch on Mississippi Street where he sits for long hours and catches the transient moment in time.
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Work Cited
Welty, Eudora. “Place in Fiction.” On Writing. Intro by Richard Bausch. The Modern Library, 2002, pp. 39-59.
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You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Salvage-Poems-Bruce-Lowry/dp/1933974486
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John (Jianqing) Zheng is the author of The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville Publishing, 2023), A Way of Looking (Silverfish Review Press, 2021), Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Texas Review Press, 2019), Delta Sun (Red Moon Press 2018), and The Landscape of Mind (Slapering Hol Press, 2002). His edited books include Conversations with Dana Gioia, African American Haiku, The Other World of Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku. He is a professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University where he edits Valley Voices: A Literary Review. Zheng’s newest chapbook Just Looking: Haiku Sequences about the Mississippi Delta is available for download via Open: Journal of Arts and Literature.
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North of Oxford 