Black Sunday

by Benjamin Myers

Black Sunday transports readers into the world of the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma where desperation, darkness, and despair reign, though hope lingers, too. The series of sonnets follows four characters through their experiences during one of the most trying times in our nation's history. In addition, the long, dramatic poem, "Faith Healer," gives readers a glimpse into a child's view of these historical events. These accessible, crafted, and wholly moving poems remind readers of the importance and power of love in the darkest times.

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Paperback

Published January 31, 2019

Reviews

[Plainswriter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read Ben Myers’s prior books, “Lapse Americana” and “Elegy for Trains,” both of which I’d highly recommend.

But this book, “Black Sunday,” is his best work thus far. Using the sonnet form (with artful variations) and several recurring characters, Myers takes readers back to the haunting time of the Dust Bowl. At times, it felt as though I were reading a short-story cycle, and I count that as a good thing.

Part 2 of the book, “The Faith Healer,” is an excellent blank-verse poem of nearly twenty pages that works well as a closing.

Myers’s poetry is both artful and accessible. He has craft and technique, yes, but his poems have heart.

The historical black-and-white photos depicting the bleakness of the Dust Bowl are the perfect pairing for Myers’s poems.

I think this is a book that would be a good read for someone who normally doesn’t read poetry, and for those who do regularly read poetry, there’s plenty for them to like.

Excellent book.

[William Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benjamin Myers' new book of poems, Black Sunday, holds together remarkably well. It appears to be grounded quite well in astonishing historical fact, but what's more impressive and important is the effect of the cohesive whole. Fact and history, place and voice, and the kind of story-telling that has a scope to begin to bring our world back home to us, if we will let it back in - these aspects of this book took me beyond enjoyment of these poems into gratitude that they were written at all.

Here is a poetry of place in a place that many people tend to think is no place at all. Most people have no interest in Oklahoma. Most people would never guess that the fictional, supposedly future, apocalypses frequently depicted in various American arts have already taken place time and time again. To know that these things happened, happened less than a hundred years ago in the middle of America, and that similar events could occur again - thinking about this makes me thankful that I live in the time I do, but it also makes me feel that I have to take the past seriously. Even moreso, and worse, I have to take apocalypse seriously, as something more than a fiction of entertainment. This may sound absurd, but the thirties must have seemed like a time of apocalypse - certainly in America and Germany, but possibly worldwide. And I am grateful to be shown how to take this apocalypse more seriously, too.

As a result of reading this book, Oklahoma as a place has become more real to me. You can hardly buy a favor like that (and reading about it in the history books does not bring it home the way poetry and art do).

Then there is the issue of voice - the accents and grammars of the south or the midwest. The sonnet form is so well adjusted to the voices speaking through it that the form at once gives beauty to the voices and receives beauty from them - and I have been one among the group who have thought that perhaps such voice was not the most beautiful of voices. This is a fantastic test for the strength of any poet - and Myers does admirably. This, too, means that the book brings another part of humanity home to me, or closer to home. Expanding one's mind or imagination is extremely valuable, but this book truly opened me up more - not only to my world, but to people in my world, past and present. As far as these poems are concerned, "imagination" and "mind" are abstractions, but the people here are real, with real voices. In such a vicious and gratuitous time, what could be more valuable?

Frankly, then, these poems are edifying - not at all by being good sermons (they aren't sermons at all), but by being good poems, grounded in real fact, history, place and voice. Which is to say, you might should read this book because you want to be more at home in the world, because you want to love people, places and voices more, or because you want to discover in this moment how poetry can be a good thing simply by being good poetry - or even why we actually need the arts in order to live good lives. This book is a valuable contribution to such an important discussion - not by being a discussion, but by being a book of poems.

The story telling is the last aspect that needs to be addressed, as far as the book "holding together" goes. Any story can be reductively summed up as a gathering of events and sayings, but here the story that is told pulls one in - and yet because it is poetry, one is allowed to move more slowly and contemplatively through the work than one would with a novel which carries one along. In America we are innocuated against the idea that our grandparents could have been wartime heroes almost a century ago - it seems unremarkable too often, and as a result it is harder to think of ourselves as living within a bigger story. But when I consider the fact that my grandparents' generation, and their parents - people at first glance apparently so unremarkable as dispossessed farmers in the dustbowl - could have faced apocalypse at home in the decades in between two world wars (fought on other continents), that gives me myself a sense of placement in a world where everyone seems so displaced. At the risk of sounding cliche, through the form of story telling in this book, this story becomes my story. This history makes my history a little less free-wheeling. It even makes it feel as though there is something epic (in multiple senses of that overused word) in even the most taken-for-granted parts of the American world.

The facts and history, place and voice, and mode of telling, then, all form a cohesive whole in bringing the world home to me. In modern America, where it seems that everyone is displaced simply by being here, we need these poems.

[Laurence Foshee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered Dr. Myers' arresting poetry, then later his formidable erudition and passion for poetics, through a draft of one of these sonnets in Rattle, "The Town Drunk Recalls The Rainmaker, Guymon, OK, 1935" (which summarily blew my mind that day in January 2019, and eventually compelled me to meet him and other Oklahoma poets laureate)

These poems, (mostly sonnets in a mix of stunning new formalism and blank verse) thread stories set in small-town Oklahoma afflicted by the horrors of the Dust Bowl: such characters include a married couple and their child, a drunk, a teacher, and a reverend (my personal favorite character of them all--maybe channeling a bit of Mark Jarmon's "Unholy Sonnets" here, but for me, Myers seems to write at his most powerful within the mode of the struggles of faith during hardships--quite possibly why he chose to end the collection not on a sonnet, but on an extended poem about faith which takes place before the main narrative).

Some of my favorites, judged mainly on remembering gorgeous snippets of varied length, as if by rote (even a couple of years later!), include:

"The Reverend On Natural Theology"
"The Reverend Complains To God" (a rhymed dimeter sonnet--how cool is that!)
"Louise Burns Remembers The Rainmaker"

and the Lily and Will duet on the nature of grief as well as "The Reverend Caught In A Duster Thinks Of His Late Wife" all hit especially hard.

Anyway, I hope y'all enjoy it and are maybe even inspired to write by it as much as I was!

[Monica Mullins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous rendering of a stark period of history. Ben’s poetry matches the circumstances so beautifully. I highly recommend reading this collection of poems.

[Kimberly Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems so moving, I had to recheck the publish date…. It was almost as though Myers himself lived through the ‘30s.

[Jana Henderson (Reviews from the Stacks) · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been a while since I studied poetry, and I have to admit that I have not read much since then. I may not remember what all of the technical terms mean anymore, or what to call a certain type of line, but I still appreciate the beauty and simplicity of the sonnet format. Despite using fewer words than a novel, we quickly get to know the characters intimately. From the preacher to the town drunk and several in between, each character is distinctly sympathetic. Functionally, Black Sunday is just as much short story cycle as it is poetry: there is a distinct plot to the vignette-like sonnets, but the energy is circular. Sometimes the energy is intense and forward-marching, while other times it lingers in the way things used to be. You could easily read the collection, then read it again with no break, and the depth of the story would only increase. Life always goes on, even situations seem to last forever.

It is more difficult than I expected to convey the essence of these poems. They feel true, and as someone who (mostly) grew up in Oklahoma, they feel a little like peeking back at my own history. Perhaps I should, on some level, be revolted by or ashamed of something that reveals my own inadequacy, as this shows just how unqualified I am to analyze meaningful poetry, but I cannot feel that way toward Black Sunday. Although I am barely able to put it into cohesive words, I got a lot out of reading this book. I ought to read works that stretch me like this more often, and I strongly recommend you read Black Sunday for yourself.