Daniel Boone's Window

Matthew Wimberley possesses an uncanny ear: he listens to ghosts, nuthatches, blood, ridges, sorrow, beeches, and to the 'run-on sentence of a creek.' This listening is an intimacy with inheritance and Appalachia. This listening is rich with astonishing connections and leaps: the 'clang of snow-chains' turns into the music of a carousel and light is retooled into a 'scalpel of an undertaker.' Compassionate and achingly precise, Wimberley's second book is remarkable —his immense gifts as a poet shine on every page. Shadows, tinfoil, turpentine, and suicides in the river—Matthew Wimberley's poems draw up sorrowful skeletons from a dark pool, sluicing water from them, bringing them into brilliant light. There are small-town collapses here, rendered as the epics they are from the interior: extinctions, inheritance, generations of forgetful and forgotten men scattered like ashes through the stanzas. There are heroes here, unfaithful, their sons standing stranded by the school, waiting to be remembered and brought home. Wimberley's skills as a carpenter of verse are showcased as he strips their stories down for telling, removing the gleaming veneer of romanticism to reveal the clean pine of the roadside marker. The poems of Daniel Boone's Window call to the wandering dead, using the rhythms of regretted speeches and echoing shouts. They catalogue the wilderness while sawdust leaks out, offering depictions of a gone world, but gone only lately, not yet obliterated, and perhaps, given the right ministrations, capable of resurrection.