Poems capture place in spare but loving detail

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BY CHRISTINE PAPPAS / For the Lincoln Journal Star

(“These Trespasses” by Jim Reese, The Backwaters Press,  74 pages, $16).  Jim Reese is a familiar voice on the Nebraska literary scene (note: he writes Nebraska Bookshelf for this page), and he is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the English department at the University of Nebraska. “These Trespasses,” his first book-length collection of poetry, brings together works that have been published in a number of different journals and poetry reviews.

The small-town, high plains place of these poems is described in spare but loving detail. Reese makes you want to be in on the joke and understand the hardness of this place, becoming friends and intimates with the sun-baked men and loose women he describes. One becomes nostalgic for the hard work of roofing or farming, and the late nights drinking bloody beer with cowboys, even if one has never actually done any of these things. One of my favorite Reese poems,“Euchre at Two,” conjures up the familiar setting of crusty farmers playing cards all afternoon in the town tavern, fists pounding on the table as they eat pie and complain about corn prices.

In his poem “Osmosis,” Reese places a father and his boy in the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

I overhear him ask his father,

‘who is this?’

‘Just an injun, son.’

‘Dad, what’s an injun?’

‘An Indian. No one

to worry yourself about.’

The boy lingers at the exhibit after his father goes around the corner. Reese writes, What gifts would he exchange for a glimpse at men who once lived free?

Men do live free in Jim Reese’s poetry, constrained only by gravity, heat, hunger and women. One character, a traveling salesman, is brought low only by the vast “space and place” of the Plains. This freedom from constraint is a major theme, and Reese experiments with both sober and quite playful poems. It’s no wonder he envies the freedoms of Natives before they were displaced and constrained by white law.

In the last third of the book, called “Feel Us Shaking,” Reese abandons the cowboy talk to a large extent and celebrates the familial bonds between himself, his daughter and his wife. His own vulnerability is evident in poems such as “Premeditation.” Here Reese describes watching his daughter sleep, pushing away thoughts of the harms that might befall her in her life.

I will not ruin myself

thinking this way.

Her eyes are open.

I am holding on – tight.

Is he holding on to save her, or will she save him? Jim Reese’s poems have never been so ambiguous, but as he shifts his focus from the hard realities of a life lived outside to the more civilized moments of a baby’s bedroom, his truths may become more complex.

Pappas is the founding editor of Plains Song Review and teaches political science in Oklahoma.