CD gives voice to poetry of UM’s Hatlen

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors or set in the Pine Tree State.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

BURT HATLEN READS HIS POETRY, by Burton Hatlen; Vox Audio, Magdalena, N.M., 2005; CD, $7.

Burton Hatlen, a senior professor in UMaine’s English department, is best-known in the local literary world for his scholarship, his skillful organizing of literary conferences, and his guidance of the National Poetry Foundation, but this CD featuring him reading 22 of his poems bolsters the idea that wider acknowledgments are due.

The poems are largely taken from Hatlen’s 1987 book, “I Wanted to Tell You,” and are read roughly in the order they were written, starting from “Love Poem” and “Intimacies” from the 1960s, up to truly accomplished verse such as “Mappings” and “A Letter to Ron Mayo” published this summer. All the poems have the subdued tone characteristic of much postwar American poetry, and likewise treat common themes involving family, local nature, and what used to be called the experience of the “deep image.”

Two things set the poems in these readings apart. One is their sense of authentic personal emotion. They convey the strong sense that the frictions and experiences of beauty expressed are deeply felt, rather than amassed as silage for poetic product. These poems reveal and evoke true vibrations of the heart, with no other apparent purpose lurking. This is a refreshing trait.

Their other distinction is the clarity of the poetic voice, both in word and in the actual sound of Hatlen’s voice, which while largely somber and subdued, at the same time discloses an understanding of the music that forms at least half the meaning of any true poem. A lot of recorded and “performed” poetry is so boring it can hardly be withstood because of the readers’ ignorance of the oral – and inner – origins of verse. But Hatlen knows what poetry sounds like, and this CD transmits it, subtly but forcefully.

Copies of “Burt Hatlen Reads His Poetry” are available by writing to Vox Audio, P.O. Box 594, Magdalena, NM 87825.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

HERE COMES THE OLD MAN NOW, by John Perrault; Oyster River Press, Durham, N.H., 2005; 84 pages, paperback, $15.

John Perrault’s poems also seem authentic in their treatment of intensely personal material, covering the old familiar themes of family, friends and moments of bedazzlement and delight in nature.

His lyrics are shaped from standard postwar forms that owe their irregular lines and speechlike rhythms – as well as their sometimes standalone imagery – largely to the modernist innovations of William Carlos Williams. Perrault’s poems seem to place a premium on homespun accessibility, in keeping with a backlash (now a decade or two old) against certain postmodern emphases on incomprehensibility. By the end of most of the poems in “Here Comes the Old Man,” there’s no mistaking the down-to-earth thought or feeling he intends to convey. “Hanging On,” a short consideration of an oak leaf clinging stubbornly to a stem through winter, concludes:

Hanging on’s a lark

To life that bears a rattle in the throat.

Perrault is a lawyer, working out of Portsmouth, N.H., and also practicing in Maine, and a singer and songwriter with six albums. He has served as poet laureate of Portsmouth, and his previous book of verse is “The Ballad of Louis Wagner.”

BY DALE MCGARRIGLE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

LINCOLN’S AVENGERS, by Elizabeth D. Leonard, Norton, New York, 2005, paperback, 373 pages, $14.95.

The term of one of America’s greatest presidents ended abruptly on April 14, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor at the time and a less well-known Confederate sympathizer.

The killing, along with a simultaneous attack on Secretary of State William Seward, was among the last gasps by the Confederacy during the Civil War. The act stunned the Union and led to calls by many for severe punishment of those responsible.

The job of determining who the guilty parties were fell on Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt. The Kentuckian was head of the Bureau of Military Justice, and was responsible for investigating and prosecuting Confederate war criminals.

Lincoln had promised to heal the divided nation with “malice toward none,” but his death threw how best to handle Reconstruction in the conquered South open to debate, especially by Holt and those of like mind, including Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

“Lincoln’s Avengers” first examines Holt’s prosecution, in some cases dubious, of Booth’s “accomplices.” He even, unsuccessfully, tried to link the attacks to Jefferson Davis and other former Confederate officials in exile in Canada.

But this volume by Leonard, an associate professor of history and chair of that department at Colby College in Waterville, uses these trials as a lens to study a turbulent time in American history. It looks at battles between “Radical Republicans” and moderate Republicans teaming with Democrats over how to best reintegrate the South into the Union and what rights the newly freed slaves would enjoy.

This meticulously researched book goes far toward explaining some of the differences in regional attitudes that linger to this day.