~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Denton Loving's Book Review by Stephen Furlong

Loving, Denton. Tamp: Poems. Mercer University Press 2023. 64 pp. $20.00.

In his opening essay, “The Lyric: A Personal History” in Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place (Mercer University Press, 2021), Jesse Graves states the following:

“The elegist confronts a seemingly impossible, certainly inevitable task: the event of loss must be articulated and made comprehensible to the audience, regardless of its magnitude or its proximity. Every sufferer of loss must absorb or deny the event, must attempt—or not—to work through it, and the elegist must carry this organic process through an artificial gateway into the realm of the poem itself, the poem in response to the loss.”

The operative word in Graves’ opening line is confronts; the root of which, confront, comes from the French word confronter, which means to border or to bound. It’s fitting, in this sense of language, that grief and confrontation elicits a connection to borders, because grief often seems to lock an individual into themselves. As Graves writes “the event of loss must be articulated and made comprehensible to the audience.” In his new collection, Tamp, Denton Loving regularly confronts grief, with results of tender, meaningful poems that explore the ideas his poem “The Broken Man” closes with—“the miracle and magic of / the dead breathed back to life.”

Tamp opens with “Hurtling,” a tender poem written in couplets, which help to further set the scenes of the book. The speaker, “five again,” is filled with anxiety, but the father’s comfort helps to “quiet the starlings in [my] belly.” This leads the heart of the poem to truly shine: “I know I am safe as long as he’s close.” Right from the first poem, it is clear that Loving’s collection concerns itself with safety and softness, despite the rough, unpredictable nature that hurtling would imply. It is through this softness that Loving’s poems shed light toward the direction of healing. Loving’s poems also explore the duality of physical and human nature, with many poems concerning farming and, to give a nod to Wendell Berry, “the care of the earth.” Poems like “There is a barn” and “Remembered by Name” are particularly reminiscent of Berry’s essays from The Gift of Good Land (North Point Press, 1981). The book’s theme central to unity and homage to the land aligns greatly with Loving’s landscape and farming poems.

I was also struck by the variety of influences in the collection: Kevin Young, Judith Light, among others. Kevin Young’s influence comes from a playful, tongue-in-cheek poem titled “Cows Don’t Consider Oblivion” that alludes to Young’s poem “Oblivion.” Further, Judith Light, well-known actress, especially known for being Angela Bower in the ABC sitcom Who’s The Boss appears in a dream poem simply titled “Upon Meeting Judith Light in a Dream.” That poem, fused with pop culture, lines up with Loving’s vision of grief and, once again, showcases a softness that proves enlightening.

These influences, much like the grief and the landscape it leaves in its wake, help shape and cultivate poems that prove enduring and encourage re-visitation. The poem modeled after the infamous Augustus Saint-Gaudens statue is, in particular, one of the most fascinating pieces of the book—its title is taken from the work itself: “The Mystery of the Hereafter.”

“The Mystery of the Hereafter” is a poem that has haunted me since my first reading. The poem is inspired by the Adams Memorial—a grave marker in honor of Marian Hooper Adams and Henry Adams. It is housed in the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC. Henry Adams’s ghost stirs in the poem from the first line: Do not call it grief. “Grief” is what many reporters gave the name of the shrouded statue, much to the irking of Adams. The poem is written in couplets that suggest unity and togetherness, lending to the poem’s wielded power until its close.

Another poem I keep going back to is “After My Father Died, I Marveled” that opens:  “In the field / cattle grazed, unbothered by the coming / winter, unfazed by the farmer’s absence.” The poem, formatted markedly differently than those previous, focuses on quick, exacting images of what is seen and who is unseen. The poem, much like the speaker, continues forward by filling absence with sustenance: “I ached with hunger— / the drive-through ladies kept taking / my orders, kept taking my money.” This ache is also magnified by the drive “back and forth / from my house to my father’s house even though / he wasn’t there.” There’s a great strength to saying something in such direct language because through that directness comes the gateway that Jesse Graves refers to. That gateway leads to tenderness for those who came before, life for the living, and grace for those who will come after. The poem ends with a sense of lucidity that can only come from grief: “…but / I was too spent / to cry or be angry / or feel anything except / the motion of it all.”

Denton Loving’s Tamp challenges the notion of elegy–the traditional view typically lensed in three stages: lament, praise, and solace. Contemporary collections surrounded by grief adhere often to a creative decision to “make it bright,” but Loving reminds us that grief is tenacious in its nature. It comes in poems like “Learning to Drive” and “Riding Lawn Mower”—poems that fuse memory and life lessons-learned philosophy that comes directly: living one’s life. These poems embody the power of memory possessed by the living when honoring those that have gone before us.

This line of thinking is especially indicative in “We Are Called to Reinvent Ourselves”:

            …I attempt

            to retrace my path home, but the trail moves

            or I do                         and in a flash, I forget all I should know.

Further still, the poem continues:

            You can spend a lifetime memorizing a place,

            the trails and trees, the land’s lay and water’s flow

            dividing your dreams from those

            who walked there before you.

This poem is reflective of a great power in Denton Loving’s poems: poems without flourishes, and the language is direct and authoritative. That authority comes from Loving’s ability throughout Tamp to fuse memory and influence to honor both his land and his lineage.

Denton Loving's Interview
Denton Loving's Poems and Bio