Walking Distance

by Debra Allbery Gildea

Winner of the 1990 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry PrizeThe power of these poems is in the woman's voice; the truth, though, is in the telling. . . . This is simply good poetry."--Painted Bride Quarterly Named Ohio Co-Poet of the Year for 1993

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1991

Reviews

[Aubrey Wagg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful and evocative, tender and haunting in the best of ways, Allbery's talent for the poetic form is highly underrated.

[Don LePan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has long seemed to me to be one of the finest poetry books of the past century. Allbery remains one of the most underrated poets in the English-speaking world.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

T.J. Clark notes that "The old ballads have a collective vehemence that is their own truth." Rarely in the last thirty years have American poems staked themselves to such a collective vehemence, hewing rather to the "fakesong" tradition, or the exquisite corpse, which absolves the singer of the need to make sense. Debra Allbery's "The Reservoir" is a narrative song, the gaps of which remain open, despite the collective vehemence of a readership which patently repudiates the recourse Allbery makes to an experience partly her own and partly that of a community, Enterprise, Ohio (this fictional town, based on Anderson's Clyde, Ohio, in the northwestern part of the state, is where Allbery grew up), from whose persons she gives herself little distance, for she relies on their collective vehemence. The lines Allbery makes over in "The Reservoir" are from "The Water Is Wide," an American song (sung recently by Bob Dylan, James Taylor and others) that is based on several old English ballads, "Jaime Douglass," and "Waly, Waly," certainly. The important bridge of that ballad is (working with Robert Graves' ethnography): I leand my back unto an aik, | I thought it was a trusty tree; | But first it bowd, and syne it brak, | Sae my true-love did lightly me." There is space between the narration's points of view, as well its ostensible subject, but that space allows the collective vehemence its room to emerge.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Debra Allbery, Walking Distance (Pittsburgh, 1991)

I figured it was high time for a re-read of this volume (one of the first, if memory serves, I ever reviewed for the Barn) after a span of years. Allbery is a rural poet, focused mainly on small-town life and the horrors, however existential, of childhood therein. Her lines remind me of these annoying Ohio winters; sparse, unforgivably cold, but the heavens open up and dump on us so rarely that it's still safe to venture out now and again for the sheer joy of basking in below freezing air. It's not thrilling for those who have to do it every day, but it's a refreshing change from the desiccation of survival in an office building.

Few enough poets today are even attempting spare, and of those, fewer still know how to do it right; the art of minimal poetry is knowing what to cut out and when. Cut out too much and you run the risk of being indecipherable; cut out too little and you run the risk of being William Carlos Williams (toward the end of his career). Allbery walks the line from first page to last in this book, and she never once falls into the safety net. There is great beauty here, for those who know the landscape about which she writes (both the physical landscape and the emotional); like most truly wonderful American poets working today, she is almost unknown, and that is a tragedy. **** ½

[Mikelkpoet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, this poet are incredible. Ms. Allbery teaches in the MFA Poetry Program at Warren Wilson, a program that I think that I would like to get into in a few years, if I am so blessed.

Ms. Allbery is a master story teller. I have read her poem, "Carnies," over and over, and I hardly ever read a poem twice. I don't understand a lot of her line breaks, but she is a master poet without losing the reader to "style." She doesn't get so deep that you have to have a Ph.d
in Poetry to understand.

I find myself talking about her to everybody I know who reads.