Brett Rutherford published The Pumpkined Heart in 1973 as a
48-page illustrated chapbook. Now, almost a half-century later, he has
assembled all of his poems that have Pennsylvania as their locale, into one
huge book, a kind of personal memoir in poems.
Three towns figure in this saga that spans early childhood
to college years: Scottdale, in the coal and coke district when the skies were
black with smoke and fumes from the coke-ovens; West Newton, a grim
steelworkers’ town hugging the steep banks of the Youghiogheny River; and
Edinboro, a college town in the northwest corner of the state, its placid lake
setting contrasting with the tumult of Vietnam-era protest.
From early childhood in Scottdale, the poet casts himself as
an outsider, breaking rules, recruiting neighbor children to act in “monster
shows,” absorbing Native American lore from a story-telling grandmother, and
learning about the Golem legend from Jewish neighbors. The other side of his
family life is “out home,” where his maternal grandparents live in squalor in a
tar-paper-covered shack. These country people, their pride and their secrets,
left an indelible impression that emerges in “memory poems,” written many
decades later. In “Peeling the Onion,” a grandmother relates to him the dark
side of living alone in the mountains, and “the kinds of things that happen to
women.”
Four high-school years in West Newton with a degenerating
family and an evil stepfather are lightened by self-discovery: “I was a poet. A
cape would trail behind me always.” Here he studies Latin, writes his first
poems, and deepens his abiding love of the Gothic in literature and film. The
fantasy poem “Son of Dracula” celebrates artistic birth, and “Mr. Penney’s
Books” gratefully recalls the town’s one mentor for the unruly young, a
bibliophile with 10,000 books.
Readers turning to the Edinboro section of this book will be
startled by the transformation of theme and mood. Rutherford attaches himself
to the town’s glacial lake, its flora and fauna, its sharp seasonal divides,
and weaves them into a Whitmanesque vision. These poems, while modern in style,
are in the spirit of Shelley, Whitman, Rilke, and Jeffers. Returning to the
locale again and again over many decades for renewal and recollection, the
poems celebrate what the poet calls, “my first-found home.” Other poems lift
the veil on the student life of the time, and the choices one had to make about
war or resistance.
The last section of the book, “Looking Backward,” includes
retrospective poems, written from far away, that look back on the childhood
places and events, rather than the straight-forward story-poems earlier in the
book.
The longer poems here are stories in verse, several of them
with multiple voices, most notably the four-voice tale, “The Doll Without A
Face.” But all the poems are clear, easily read aloud, and aimed at the reader
who may be wary of poetry.
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