Lures by Adam Vines Review by Leona Sevick
Lures by Adam Vines
Review by Leona Sevick
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
ISBN: 978-0-807 1-7689-4
Publication Date: February 9, 2022, Pages: 58
I read Adam Vines’ Lures in a foreign country on a beautiful beach at the home of good friends. What should have been a vacation became an opportunity for recovery. My mother had died unexpectedly several months before, and then the world had violently crowbarred its way into my relatively peaceful work life. Caring for the people I love kept me from dwelling on losses—mine and others’. Vines’ book reminds us we’re always recovering from something. The when, the where, the who dissolve in common stories of loss. Our response to these losses shapes who we become.
In Lures, Vines considers the domestic spaces and water haunts, the friendships and love bonds that comprise a life, hour by hour and word by word. His poems, crafted in every form including several nonce forms, engage in close observation of people and moments that can be difficult to look at, and the language—sometimes playful, other times direct and devastating—draws us into layered worlds:
…………………………The rotten eaves replaced, the shutters
…………………………that a friend half -scraped three years ago
…………………………before the night took him back
…………………………to needling that vein he thought he’d closed.
……………………………………………………(“Maintenance for the Heartbroken” 1)
This directness makes Vines’ poems so successful; the seeing eye does not blink.
Friendships old and new permeate this collection in touching and unusual ways. In the title poem, the speaker, who perhaps finds himself out of place in the big city, remembers a long-standing friendship from home that was punctuated by “half-ounce jigs with rubber skirts/and jelly worms with wide-gap hooks” (“Lures” 9). The speaker ruminates on the inevitability of change, occasioned by the death of his friend:
…………………………Our girls will never know that pond’s deep hole
…………………………a baseball diamond now fills—the city leaders’ bright
…………………………idea—or how their fathers sitting in the bleachers
…………………………on Saturdays a couple decades later
…………………………Can almost feel the stinging nettle against
…………………………their thighs…. (“Lures” 9)
Rather than lamenting these and other painful losses, Vines, via the poems in this collection, softens imagined “stinging nettle against” with the sound of “mothers’ and fathers’ voices calling us home” (“Lures” 9). Vines fly ties hope to the steady lines of these poems—a hope born of witness and memory. “My Father’s Rod: Fishing the Skinny Moon” (3) is a poem that, like others in Lures, ripples with an unrelenting current of work and worry. The father in this poem and others is a tired, hard man whose labor is never done. When the speaker insists “We’d be all right…The bills were paid. He held his rod. He’d be all right” (3), we want to believe him.
Cautious hope drifts into other poems in Lures. With language at once casual and pointed, Vines’ poems recount sensitive conversations between fathers and daughters that bite softly into a hard hull of truth. A precocious child interrogates her father in “Morning Question in Bed after the Women’s Marches across America” (21), and instead of spouting platitudes of received wisdom, the father encourages her to wend her own way through the difficult issues of gender roles, sex, the body, and women’s self-worth. Juxtaposed with the hardscrabble language of masculinity and working-class fatigue that characterizes other poems in the collection, these delicate poems illustrate the kind of love often unrealized in earlier generations. In these poems, the love between fathers and their children flows freely:
…………………………You ask, “What is our only comfort in?”
…………………………I can’t respond. I hide my face. “In us,”
…………………………you say for me with fortitude and grace. (21)
In Lures, parents are healing from unspeakable loss, and the language of planting and potential gives the reader some hope for recovery: “The garden will beget/what we cannot, despite the cold and rainless days ahead,/and we will sow into ourselves, unsure of how we’re fed” (“After Losing a Child” 10).
In this collection Vines addresses racism and other issues endemic to the American South with the same honesty that appears in his earlier collections. “Second-Grade Christmas Pageant, Birmingham, Alabama, 1976” (19) recollects a flamboyant, loving drama teacher whose wild hair and flapping dashiki frighten mothers and elicit racist comments from fathers in the audience. The father’s belt cinched around his son’s waist, which he “dared to loosen during curtain call,” suggests danger and potential violence. Fear and loss have many origins, readers are reminded, not least of which the families who beget us.
Not surprisingly, Lures revels in the mysterious and lovely language of fishing—as rich and multivalent as the metaphor suggests. Desire, expectation, and regret dangle from Vines’ capable lines, trolling and plumbing all that lives below the glinting surface. In “Tithing Beers” (36), the speaker recalls
…………………………my plugs, the Model A
…………………………Bombers my uncle used
…………………………in holes, off points, pre-spawn,
…………………………for fish transitioning. (36)
along with the morning beers his uncle drinks until he dies of liver failure. Such surprising moments of tenderness appear throughout Lures, a poignant homage to the complex people who formed the speaker.
Present also in these poems is the specter of aging. According to Vines himself, many of these poems were written decades ago, and the collection’s generous nod to the past no doubt springs from the speaker’s contemplation of middle age:
…………………………At fifty, the need is want and want is need.
…………………………I can’t abide the dictionary’s what-
…………………………we-will a moment longer, what we should
…………………………because of time, what scales we shimmer, leave behind.
……………………………………………………(“Preservation for the Heartbroken” 58)
Time demands its own heavy tithes in Vines’ poems, but beauty and possibility live here, too. Readers will find in this collection a strong voice and close, careful attention to the language of loss. For my part, it is this voice—singular and capable—that helped propel me out of my own torpor. Lures’ honest language and layered worlds reflect the emptied spaces many of us inhabit. Here the words shimmer and spin, drawing us in and hooking us hard.
Adam Vines is associate professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of three collections of poetry, including Out of Speech, and coauthor of two collections. His work has appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and the Southern Review, among other journals.
Leona Sevick is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her recent work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, and the Southern Review. She is professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature.
10 August 2022
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