Barbara Brannon, producer of Lone Star Literary Life, studied poetry with James Dickey at the University of South Carolina, where she earned the MA and PhD. Her poems have appeared in the Asheville Poetry Review, Broad River Review, Cenacle, Kakalak, Light, Measure, the South Carolina Review, and Yemassee, among other outlets, including the anthology Bearing the Mask: Southwest Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016). Working for the state of Texas’s heritage tourism program, she is a frequent contributor of travel and feature articles and is coauthor, with Kay Ellington, of the Paragraph Ranch series of Texas novels.

POETRY

Donald Mace WIlliams

Wolfe and Other Poems

Wundor Editions (UK), www.wundoreditions.com

Paper with flaps, 978-0995654129, _____ pgs., $15.10 + $3.99 shipping via Blackwell’s UK, or purchase locally at Burrowing Owl Books, Canyon, Texas

May 2017

Reviewed by Barbara Brannon

Seven years ago this week, on a Fourth-of-July camping excursion to Palo Duro Canyon, I wandered into the park store for ice and charcoal and wandered out with a book that set my imagination on fire.

I hadn’t expected to encounter a literary masterpiece there in the trading post, den of Coleman lanterns and toy tomahawks and T-shirts and Deep Woods Off! and “The Best Burger in the World,” but then, I hadn’t looked for Beowulf in the era of Charlie Goodnight, either.

Canyon, Texas, author, poet, and quondam newspaperman Donald Mace Williams had achieved publication in the estimable Rattle journal the previous year for his homage, in epic verse, to the classic Anglo-Saxon tale. Rattle editor Timothy Green laid out the long poem as a chapbook, and the author — clearly familiar with the canyon’s natural and human history — persuaded the park store to sell copies.

“Fat Herefords grazed on rich brown grass,” the text began. Though devoid of the edh or thorn I’d learned in college, it swiftly drew me into the powerful pace of the Anglo-Saxon line, and only a page in, the stage was deftly set for the retelling. Prosperous cattleman Tom Rogers (readily recalling the Danish king Hrothgar), “all his ranch paid off” and getting on in years, suddenly finds his herds attacked by a monster that puts the locals in mind of the ancient dire wolf, “no plain lobo.” It’s a fearless cowhand from other parts, young Billy Wolfe, who comes to Rogers’s aid.

I was hooked. Thin, stapled volume in one hand, plastic bag of ice dripping from the other (I clean forgot the charcoal and had to walk back later), I tramped back to the tent. Beside it, under the lean shade of a mesquite, I read till the sun dipped below the canyon rim.

By first gold light of the next day

Three men traced where the beast had bled

In flight and found the dried pools led

To just the sheerest, wildest drop

In the whole canyon. From the top,

Bending, Wolfe saw a claw-scuffed streak

Down the cliff halfway to the creek,

Vanishing where a ledge thrust out

Beneath and overhang. No doubt

The thing had crawled into its lair,

Wolfe said. “Likely it’s died in there.”

We all know what happens next, when the mother of the mortally injured Grendel returns to exact revenge on the monster’s killer. Williams relates the tale masterfully, his use of rhyme, alliteration, and word precise and musical as that of the Beowulf poet. (“In keeping with my purpose of modernizing the Beowulf episodes,” the author explains, “I have used rhymed couplets rather than the Old English alliterative verse forms. Most lines are tetrameter, but some passages are in hexameters, just as in Beowulf the four-stress lines occasionally give way to six-stress ones.”)

At the same time, he maintains the diction of the Panhandle and the lore of its most famous episodes: buffalo hunts curtailed by a fenced range; Mackenzie’s slaughter of Comanche ponies, bringing the Indian way of life to an end; the honor and the desperation of the “cowboy way.”

“Williams’s ‘Wolfe’ is a flawless epic,” wrote Green soon after the chapbook’s publication, “and in turning the legend of Beowulf into a critique of man’s encroachment on nature, it has a chance at ringing the bell of the current zeitgeist.”

Seven years on, we can rejoice at the appearance of Williams’s epic as the centerpiece of a collection of his work, beautifully designed, all of it as keenly connected to the workings of the human heart and the observation of the natural world as the title poem. Wolfe and Other Poems, though presented by Wundor Editions (London) in a format even smaller than that of the Rattle chapbook, to my mind echoes the potency of Robert Frost’s fire and ice, the lapidary structures of Donald Hall’s form and themes, the wit of Kay Ryan, the folk allegories of Wendell Berry. Yet Williams’s brilliance is all his own, the distillation of a long lifetime of study, reading, and deadline writing.

In a roughly chronological progression, Williams traces the experience of the persona from literary influences (“Credo”) evoking an opposing heat to Emily Dickinson’s “zero at the bone,” to moments of youth (“Tough Roots, 1934,” “Rose, 1936”) and self-awareness (“By What Right, 2001”) to impending mortality (“The Question,” “Storm Shadow”).

My favorites, however, are those that riff on a scene, plant, or animal, drawing a life lesson from the land. “The Broadest Mountain,” describing New Mexico’s Sierra Grande (the, ahem, mountain visible as one circles the cone of the Capulin volcano near Clayton), at once mocks the tendency to turn every destination into a superlative and finds merit in the claim. “Piñon” captures that same, sparse landscape that artists of the smoothly shaded module, like Peter Hurd and Georgia O’Keeffe, found so captivating in the Land of Enchantment. It’s “Wind” that speaks most of West Texas: the Sisyphean cycle of the seasons in which the wind makes “Dents in the tall wheat, when fields are green” that “Cross as if swished by dark hands feeling the changes / In texture,” and later, when “the green / Shows where we foiled the wind-driven purpose the brown.”

Williams’s poems have helped me to make more of music: whether the guitar tunes of the unfortunate Ashley in “Wolfe” or the songs of birds in “Chickadees.” I had the great good fortune to attend a performance, a few months after first encountering “Wolfe,” of Williams’s epic read by the author alongside an original piano composition during an Amarillo Chamber Music Society recital. Each art form brought the other to fuller life.

And his poems have helped me appreciate the adopted land I walk. “As any hiker my age knows,” says the speaker in “The Venturi Effect,” canyons “spread out and vanish. Their canyonness goes.” That may be true. Or so might be the different perspective, like mine or that of Tom Rogers, who watched from his rocking chair, the contentment he felt “there where the brim / Of Palo Duro Canyon, dim / And distant, showed.”

Wolfe and other Poems is a modern classic layered upon others, drawing from the same soil as ancient and more recent sediments but unmistakably our own.

* * * * *

Donald Mace Williams was born on Black Thursday, 1929, in Abilene, Texas. The former academic and newspaper editor now resides close to the Palo Duro Canyon.

“Wolfe” is a modern retelling of the story of Beowulf, which relocates the action to Texas in the late 19th Century.

When a strange, beguiling creature is found to have slaughtered first the cattle of a lonely ranch, then one of its laborers, the fate of the locals is placed in the hands of an out-of-towner, a calm and confident young man by the name of Billy Wolfe.

Rattle originally published the work as a limited chapbook in the US, and it has come to be seen by many as a modern classic. It has been studied in schools in Texas. It is a captivating adventure tale and it reads as a compelling examination of the shadow side of the United States, in the past and in the present.

Wolfe is published alongside a collection of Williams’ short poems in book form for the first time.