A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New (2007), by Judson Mitcham, has recently been published by the University of Georgia Press. The value of the poems previously collected in Somewhere in Ecclesiastes and This April Morning are reflected in reviews and awards they received. The first book won both the Devins Award and recognition for Mitcham as Georgia Author of the Year. Mitcham has received two Townsend awards for his novels, The Sweet Everlasting and Sabbacth Creek. He's the only author to win two Townsend awards, both for fiction.
Mitcham is a very fine poet. The work collected in his first two volumes of poems tends towards the narrative and the philosophical, though not in an abstract way. Instead Mitcham approaches philosophical matters—such matters as the passage of time, human mortality, memory, for example—through illustrating them with examples from his own life or from people he has known. Philosophy for Mitcham is always tied up with the personal. There is a strongly spiritual tone to his poetry. It is not precisely correct to describe his work as religious, but he is definitely concerned with many issues of religion, such as redemption, sin, contrition, and so on.
Somewhere in Ecclesiastes (1991) offers a moving sequence of poems, written throughout the 1980s, about youth, family, mortality, and the southern cultural scene. They especially concern themes of personal loss, such as the death of Mitcham's father and memories of friends from his youth. This intensely felt, elegiac sense of loss is the central feeling in many of Mitcham's poems. The later poems, many collected in the 2003 volume This April Day, are tinged with a deepening pessimism and despair over the disappearance of the people who played a crucial role in his early life and in the formation of his identity as a person and a poet.
The new poems in A Little Salvation presented under the title "Oblique Lexicon," are something of a departure for Mitcham in style, although he continues to visit many of the themes and concerns that characterize his earlier work. In line with the lexicographic title, the poems are arranged alphabetically by title. One could object to this ordering of poems as a kind of gimmick, and that it may be, but the lexicographic model is how Mitcham chose to write and organize these poems, and whether it works or not, or whether it contributes in a constructive way to the overall effect of the poems, it is what we have. I became convinced after reading through these new poems that even if the model doesn't enhance the poems it certainly doesn't detract from them. I found only a few poems that could have been written for the sake of providing poems whose titles begin with a needed letter of the alphabet.
Beyond the matter of alphabetic unity, Mitcham in these new poems employs several new poetic styles, or at least styles he did not use frequently before. Along with the narrative poems he favored earlier in his career, he writes a number of shorter poems, some of them in the lyric mode (e.g., "Lyric," not surprisingly). The opening poem "Art" is written entirely in couplets, with the exception of the final single line. "Epilogue," about memories provokes by photographs, employs three-line stanzas, again concluding with a single line. There are several dialect poems: "Dream" and "Ignorance" are examples. Several poems employ poetry in prose form, such as the very effective "Understanding," in part about the murderer Charles Whitman who shot down numerous students at the University of Texas in 1966. The poem, "Body," employs an approach that at first seems whimsical, as Mitcham muses over the kinds of items we inadvertently ingest ("the rat hair and roach wing") when eating hot dogs at ball games, though ultimately he links this concern with the discovery of a tumor growing in his mother's brain. Mitcham often uses this approach of tying together events, people, or memories seemingly unrelated in time, place, or nature.
Some of these poems pay tribute to literary forebears: "Grace" is for Flannery O'Connor; "Tennessee" for William Carlos Williams and his poem "The Jar"; "Village" is for Stanley Kunitz; while "Villanelle" (which, as far as I can tell, is not a villanelle) apparently pays homage to Mississippi writer Larry Brown.
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