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Gust: Poems
Irresistible in its color and momentum, Greg Alan Brownderville's debut collection explores the competing mysticisms of his the Voudou of his native Arkansas Delta and the Pentecostalism embodied by his devil-hunting pastor, Brother Langston. On the one hand, "gust" sonically suggests "ghost," and wind is a metaphor for inspiration and the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, "gust" suggests urge and pleasure, especially of the gastronomic variety, thus evoking the body.
Brownderville commands the complex eloquence of Southerners who love not only local color but also high-flown rhetoric. Instead of reinforcing stereotypes about rural folks' thought and speech, he challenges our assumptions by presenting real life as a festival of mixed diction. Church, as Brownderville enacts it, both quickens and forbids the erotic, whose lightning flashes and crashes everywhere in these poems. Highlights include a press conference with a bizarrely poetic rural sheriff, a Zimbabwean meter never before employed in English, a rock and roll song interrupted by a Walmart intercom, and poems about the exploitation of Italians in Arkansas cotton fields.
At once evoking Yeats and Whitman, Gust recovers the dramatic mode often neglected in contemporary American poetry. Brownderville's uncanny lyricism storms through stories that are both moving and humorous.
Brownderville commands the complex eloquence of Southerners who love not only local color but also high-flown rhetoric. Instead of reinforcing stereotypes about rural folks' thought and speech, he challenges our assumptions by presenting real life as a festival of mixed diction. Church, as Brownderville enacts it, both quickens and forbids the erotic, whose lightning flashes and crashes everywhere in these poems. Highlights include a press conference with a bizarrely poetic rural sheriff, a Zimbabwean meter never before employed in English, a rock and roll song interrupted by a Walmart intercom, and poems about the exploitation of Italians in Arkansas cotton fields.
At once evoking Yeats and Whitman, Gust recovers the dramatic mode often neglected in contemporary American poetry. Brownderville's uncanny lyricism storms through stories that are both moving and humorous.
- GenresPoetry
136 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 24, 2012
Recently I had the pleasure of hearing Greg Alan Brownderville read from Gust. His poems hold your attention when you read them silently. When you hear him read them aloud, each line takes you by the scruff of your neck and grabs you. After hearing him read, I read the book all over again, just to imagine each poem in the author's unique voice.
February 12, 2012
A powerful and rich book from a distinctive new voice. Brownderville's steamy, slithering South is one to be reckoned with.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews