New Titles in Poetry

Holding Everything Down
Author: William Notter
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Paper $14.95 (73 p.)
ISBN-13: 9780809329274
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In his first collection of poems, Holding Everything Down, William Notter shares his deep understanding of the modern American West, its wild places and its people. Both come alive through his lines, yet it is the people who haunt the reader. The characters in these poems reveal themselves through their actions, and even more so through their spin on their actions. Grounded in the eye-stretching horizons of the landscapes, you’d think these characters would seem small. Yet his characters matter to others in their lives, to strangers, and to us, because Notter works so well the contrast of his men and women and their hopes against the immense and impartial country where they live. It is impossible not to care about the speaker in “Gray’s First Sober Year,” or about the “Dead Guy” who appears in four of the poems in the first section of the book, whose job it is to drive around and collect dead cows and horses.

The voices in these poems are pitch-perfect. The lines of dialog, whether thought or spoken, are lively and irresistible for their pith and truth. The range of subjects in play among the characters is wide, and includes the jolting, the funny, the pitiful. These poems whip along like prairie wind. Notter’s clean, uncluttered lines make for speed. Where the poem is a narrative, the reader is tossed into the middle of things, and caught up on backstory as events unfold. That makes even more profound the pauses in Notter’s lines, where the reader must stop and marvel.

Here is an American sensibility at work, both in the choice of subjects, and in their treatment. One of the results is that some of these poems are just plain fun. The wide open spaces invite the poet’s reflection, yet they also draw from him another response—empty roads, he knows, are made for speed. “First Love” speaks not of a girl, but of a car whose torque “…could boil tires into second gear…” and in which “the world tunneled down to redline hum and blacktop…”.

It is no secret that Notter shares the feeling of the woman in his moving “The Ranch Woman’s Secret.” Yet he works toward a peace with the world he inhabits in these poems. He celebrates what is, finding worthiness everywhere he looks: in coyotes, in the empty spaces, in his unkillable old car, in the soul of a stranger wrestling with detox. He knows his subject by heart, which is how he can write about its heart, the “…sky that can let us believe there still is freedom” (“Route 66, Arizona, 1953”). Holding Everything Down is American poetry at its finest.