A CARNIVAL OF POEMS

Badgett (Rock Dust, 2010, etc.) exhibits impressive artistic range, under a single tent assembling poetry simple and complex, flash fiction, a short dramatic piece and a selection of graphic art including woodcut, collage and photography.

Of the many subjects that inspire Badgett’s fervid and often biting pen—among them ideology and celebrity, intellectualism and authenticity, epistemological puzzles, identity formation and social pressure—none provoke more tender and authentic responses from him than the lives and work of coal miners, a topic he approaches with directness rarely on display elsewhere in the collection. Much like Gary Snyder’s poetry on loggers, Badgett’s miner poems are concrete and unembellished, all the more reverent for their simplicity. Writing about the 1981 Dutch Creek No. 1 mine explosion that killed 15 miners, Badgett honors the men’s unremarkable final moments, emphasizing the looming tragedy through repeated progressive tense verbs: “Waiting to descend / Into the hole, joking / Squinting at the sun / Having a smoke /… / Staring at muddy boots / Daydreaming.” Badgett’s interest in tangible, lived moments takes a Wordsworth-ian turn in “On the Flattops,” in which the narrator alludes to but also deflects attention from an ambiguous moment—perhaps ecstatic, perhaps violent. Instead, he focuses on the landscape and its psychic effects: a “sea breeze blows across this rolling world of / mountain grasses // Over there—at the far end of a long echo / That gash of pink and bone-white limestone” and “These skunk cabbages, these wild / geraniums and pearly everlastings! // We shall walk these windswept hills, / walk these fields in quiet gladness.” Social commentary pervades much of the poetry, as in “Class We Bring Good News,” in which students are taught that “You are meaningless / Machines / You are accidental animals” and then encouraged to “Reach / For the stars / Follow your dream.” The collection takes on an increasingly surreal tone, juxtaposing pop culture and historical images with Badgett’s personal visions, finally culminating in the absurdist, Beckett-inspired drama, “Nothing Fails to Amaze Me,” which features, among other oddities, a scene of five minutes of silence broken up only by 10 seconds of flashing lights. While his more surreal work is so idiosyncratic as to resist general evaluation, Badgett has an undeniable gift for imbuing the most mundane scenes and landscapes with deep, and often dangerous, psychic implications that endow his poetry with a surprising and rewarding psychological profundity.

A far-reaching, rambunctious collection.