Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s Poetry in America (University of Pittsburgh Press) is her third collection of poems. It consists of forty-four poems organized, like so many books of poetry, into three sections, with more than half of the poems cast in invitingly readable two or three line stanzas.  This collection has been a dozen years in the making. Her last collection, Eve’s Striptease, was a quiet triumph of lyrical and narrative poems. 

With her latest book, what announces itself to me on first read is a vein of Western Pennsylvania toughness and, related to this toughness, a fondness for all that is no-nonsense, plain-spoken, and expedient.  The poem Garlic, for example, concludes:

Oh think of the time a person can waste

All her life, she said, trying to peel off

Impossible paper skins when you can just

Strike the thing with whatever’s at hand.

In the poem Cardio Kickboxing in an Town of 6,000  the citizens of the town are all punching through and toughening up—

Harder, harder! She screams, I know you can

Hit harder than that! She’s a third grade teacher

And mother of four. Yes! That’s better, now

Give me your uppercut. Swing from your legs!

Harder, harder! Whatever you got, I can take.

The toughness even bleeds into the landscape as in this excellent poem entitled Westmoreland

Jewel weed thrived along Stink Crik, water rusted

in ponds of runoff and in parking lots slag chips

were flamingo feathers. The Del Bene brothers rode to fires

hanging off the fire truck their bloody butcher aprons

flapping brides rode to their wedding receptions

clinging to that truck, veils trailing smoke tongues.

This is the world and time where—

Band members were faggots, thespians were faggots, brains

Hid in the library during Activity Period

Yep, Kasdorf definitely renders the zeitgeist of the mill towns along Monongahela Valley in the mid- to late 1940s and early 1950s, accurately.  The steel industry was king and few questioned the king because the king provided jobs.  Few questioned the fact that there was absolutely no vegetation of any sort growing in an half mile radius of the U.S. Steel’s Zinc Works in Donora Pennsylvania. The infamous Donora smog inversion of 1948, that forced school children, my own mother among them, to squint their way to school wearing bandanas over their faces like bandits, that blotted out the sun for four days, that killed twenty people and sickened thousands, finally forced the American Steel and Wire Company and the U.S. Steel Zinc Works to cease operations, but, rest assured, full operations resumed in the less than 24 hours.

What separates Julia Kasdorf from the run-of-the-mill town poets is her refusal to condemn. Even though the time and towns were undeniably toxic, like living in a lit cigarette, finally there is no place like home.  Kasdorf treats the landscape not with a judging, critical eye, but looks back with the almost absolving fondness of a native:

Like all the Hawthorne they forced

us to read in the 11^th grade, was Westmoreland County wasted

on us, so young, all we could learn was to hate it?

Perhaps part of the Western Pennsylvania grittiness that saturates many of these poems comes from Kasdorf’s repeated use of that apotheosis of steel—the automobile.  Fully half of the poems either involve cars overtly like the poems Doubling the Digits, 78’ Chevy, The Baby Screaming in the Backseat and The Girl in the Backseat Returns to Pittsburgh” or indirectly like the poems Gettysburg 1996  or Gravity Hill.   In her poem English 213: Introduction to Poetry Writing, she writes

A car is not a metaphor, is a machine made of countless metal parts

that keep us mindful  of oil, coolant, a milk jug in the truck

in which to dilute it, mindful of all the ways a day can turn. . .

Perhaps it is only right that a collection entitled Poetry in America should have the automobile figure in so prominently, but lest I leave you with impression Kasdorf is solely the poet of mill town blight, the Phillip Levine of the Monongahela Valley, I hasten to highlight other aspects of the book.

As Kasdorf is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State, you might expect a number of poems that deal with the classroom—teaching or memories of being taught.  There are several of these, and the poem Elegy Against----Ten Years Later is the best among them:

When I read the news, I imagined him bloody

in a claw foot bathtub back home. Surely

in poor Oklahoma the tubs are ordinary, but

How could a plain tub hold his body? I want
the graceful curve, white and smooth and cool

And tender against his large hard shoulders.

The second section of the book also features poems about motherhood.  In writing these poems, these songs of innocence, Kasdorf joins the chorus of female poets-- Sharon Olds, Naomi Nye, and Robin Behn spring to mind—who have written effectively of the new magic of childhood. The book also features several fixed form poems—several deft sonnets and even a ghazal.  This was a pleasant surprise.  The final section of the book finds Kasdorf returning to the familiar ground of life in the Mennonite community.  Her first award winning collection, Sleeping Preacher, gave the world a glimpse into the Amish-Mennonite community and dealt with the speaker’s problematic cultural adjustments.  This new collection’s most powerful and memorable poem, Rachel on the Threshing Floor, returns to Mifflin County and the poet’s own family tragedy:

All that is left of her: a long, gray apron,

steel rimmed spectacles with one shattered lens,

two diaries, her name Rachel embroidered

on a quilt patch, and the photograph from 1948.   

…

She was so beloved, the stable was full and horses

had to be tied to fence posts the length of the lane

Follow though buggy ruts and dung piles, enter the barn

Find her body and children too stunned to know she is gone

Kasdorf’s Poetry in America sounds every note on the scale of tones, forms,  and intensities. There are notes of toughness and tenderness, notes of witness and experience—all the notes, to my ear,  in tune.