{"id":1039,"date":"2018-12-31T15:22:11","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1039"},"modified":"2018-12-31T15:22:11","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:22:11","slug":"lone-star-book-reviews-35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1039","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

Barbara Brannon<\/span>, 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,<\/span> and Yemassee,<\/span> among other outlets, including the anthology Bearing the Mask: Southwest Persona Poems <\/span>(Dos Gatos Press, 2016). Working for the state of Texas\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

POETRY<\/p>\n

Chera Hammons<\/span><\/p>\n

The Traveler\u2019s Guide to Bomb City<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Paperback, 94 pages, 978-0-944048719, $15.00<\/p>\n

Virtual Artists Collective (Purple Flag Press)<\/p>\n

January 2017<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Barbara Brannon<\/p>\n

I spend a lot of time in and around Amarillo, Texas<\/span> \u2014 was there just last Friday, in fact \u2014 and, frankly, all that travel is why it\u2019s taken me so long to craft this review of an excellent collection of poems that I\u2019ve had on my desk since, well, January\u2019s Panhandle ice storm.<\/p>\n

I know this city, and I know this country. I nod my head in precise recognition when Yellow City poet Chera Hammons<\/span> in The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City<\/span> describes the pronghorns that \u201cshyly dip their muzzles into the grass \/ in the ochre fields beside the highway\u201d (Changing Time Zones\u201d); \u201ca gelding whickering from behind a gate \/ and an afternoon-crowing rooster far off\u201d in a place where \u201cthe trees all lean from the southwest\u201d (\u201cTown & Country Store\u201d). It\u2019s a landscape where houses are \u201cscattered like worn brown stones as far as the caprock\u201d (\u201cUnpaved Road\u201d) and pumpjacks stand \u201ctedious in their dumb horsey faces\u201d (\u201cMineral Rights\u201d).<\/p>\n

I marveled at the account of a red fox traversing a downtown parking lot in search of wild food (\u201cUrban Red\u201d) \u2014 I\u2019ve seen that scene, pulling over to photograph one of the creatures in an alley one night near Polk and Tenth.<\/p>\n

But Amarillo has a terrifying secret. Or a secret to some, though \u201cOnce you know, you notice\u201d (\u201cbomb city\u201d). Just one county to the east is located the 16,000-acre Pantex Plant, America\u2019s primary nuclear weapons stockpile. The plant produced conventional bombs during World War II, but since that time has operated under various contractors to assemble, and dismantle, nuclear warheads in its high-security bunkers. One could readily deduce, as I did years ago in reading Pat Frank\u2019s<\/span> sci-fi novel Alas, Babylon,<\/span> that certain destinations in the United States would beyond doubt pose prime targets for enemies in a nuclear apocalypse. Amarillo knows the real-world target lies in their back yard.<\/p>\n

Hammons crafts deceptively straightforward rubrics for her book\u2019s four chapters: \u201cClimate,\u201d \u201cWildlife,\u201d \u201cDomesticated Species,\u201d and \u201cCulture and Demographics.\u201d It is in the last of these that we find a faux chamber-of-commerce factoid neatly slipped in: \u201cMajor industries include meat packing, oil drilling, and assembly and disassembly of nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus I begin at the end of these four sections, and it\u2019s appropriate.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s be bothered by endings for the last time,\u201d the last poem concludes, a carpe diem<\/span> sentiment toward which earlier poems build. Failed romances (and new ones) thread through a satisfyingly cohesive narrative in which canned tomatoes serve as a twenty-first-century memento mori.<\/span> If \u201cTeotwawki\u201d in Hammons\u2019s opening title for the fourth section sounds to you like a Kiowa name, don\u2019t look for it on the map; consult, instead, preparations for The End Of The World As We Know It.<\/p>\n

Yet this is no Pat Frank nuclear dystopia. In Hammons\u2019s flowing, free-verse lyrics, the natural world delights us in its detail, then turns on a moment of wonder. As the speaker mildly contemplates the habits of \u201cmoths who can\u2019t \/ remember how to leave \/ looking for gaps in the sill,\u201d the next stanza has her (yes, her; I can only see the author as narrator here) observing in a leap of cognition, \u201cIf I could trap angels this way, I would\u201d (\u201cNavigation\u201d). Butterflies open their wings instinctually; spiders wait, their \u201ctiny suspended mouths with hesitant octaves\u201d a perfect echo of their eight-legged bodies\u00a0 (\u201cArachnology\u201d); birds and mammals populate \u201cThe Hare,\u201d a poem that melds, for me, James Dickey\u2019s<\/span> \u201cThe Heaven of Animals\u201d with Gerard Manley Hopkins\u2019s<\/span> \u201cThe Windhover\u201d and \u201cPied Beauty,\u201d or any Mary Oliver<\/span> poem. You\u2019ll see what I mean, in its first lines:<\/p>\n

A fawn buck crouches<\/p>\n

in the shade of a post,<\/p>\n

his nose a pink heartbeat.<\/p>\n

Since the hour of birth<\/p>\n

he has not found a safe womb,<\/p>\n

but ruminates earth<\/p>\n

while the dandelions seed,<\/p>\n

their green offspring learning flight<\/p>\n

and sticking to fur.<\/p>\n

The wheat finds mirrors<\/p>\n

in gold eyes of peregrines.<\/p>\n

Rabbits breach like fish.<\/p>\n

The soft does scatter<\/p>\n

in broken strings of rosary,<\/p>\n

that have been touched once.<\/p>\n

Lest these lyrics lull us too far into peaceful contemplation, Hammons reminds us that Bomb City is only seventeen miles away. \u201cThis is the ugly part of Texas,\u201d claims our tour guide in \u201cAmarillo\u201d in a sort of backhanded Baedeker. \u201cWe stayed because it all started out so well. \/ Then we learned how to wring beauty \/ from anything we could.\u201d<\/p>\n

The domesticated and wild animals of this landscape clash and claw and ultimately live in symbiosis, as do its humans. People drink. They drive. They betray. They tolerate the drinking of others.<\/p>\n

A married couple, a woman with friends (enough to move a used piano, at least), and extended family members, inhabit the region, and they all keep a sharp eye on the weather. They build a fence; they must put a horse down.\u00a0 It is this interaction of resident with environment, predator with prey, wind with water, beneath the ever-present specter of annihilation, that has wrung beauty from an unlikely inspiration. Many of these poems saw first publication in the nation\u2019s finest journals, and we look for more from Chera Hammons \u2014 if the bomb doesn\u2019t get us first. If we fret that everywhere in the natural world hides human-made disaster in plain sight, we take comfort that in every suburban ceiling corner lurks a tiny spider, and on any given city street on any given day, a wild red fox might cross our path.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

Chera Hammons <\/span>is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College. Her work has most recently appeared in such publications as Beloit Poetry Journal, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Re- view, Rattle, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, <\/span>and The Writer\u2019s Almanac.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her books include Amaranthine Hour<\/span> (recipient of the Jacar Press Chapbook Award, 2012) and Recycled Explosions<\/span> (Ink Brush Press, 2016). She resides in Amarillo with her husband, three horses, two dogs, three cats, a donkey, and a rabbit.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lone Star Book Reviews of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}