Book Review: Potscrubber Lullabies

Potscrubber Lullabies, by Eric McHenry. Waywiser Press, June 2006. $14 paper

Ambrose Bierce drew national boundaries between humor and wit: “Nearly all Americans are humorous; if any are born witty, Heaven help them to emigrate.” British publisher Waywiser Press accepts (for publication anyway) émigrés of the poor climate in this country for wit-wrought metrical poetry and they have preserved a rare specimen of American cleverness in selecting Potscrubber Lullabies.

Eric McHenry’s principal virtue is not being stuffy. An ironic smirk and a cultivated wonder preside in these poems, equally happy unpacking an idiom as repacking a sonnet’s suitcase. Potscrubber Lullabies will show you shades of Frost, the likes of Larkin, and nods to Nemerov—particularly if you flip to McHenry’s “Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry.” This take on the classic title looks not to a change in the weather but a picture window and “its two recurring crows,” noticing “Some flaw in their understructure / compensates the most emphatic flapping / with very little loft.” (One could say the same about contemporary lyric, in its loose, broody setups to puffy epiphanies.) McHenry redirects the observation toward prose and poetry, with perhaps as memorable a line as the original: “One barely goes / over and the other just gets by.”

The poet must be a music hound; some poems read like amusing rants from music store clerks. There’s a good tension between originals and new versions, as seen in “Good Times,” where the poet serves up a villanelle from Sam Cooke lyrics. He makes much of mondegreens (one poem explores the implications of idiom after a singer miscroons the song “She’s a Brick House,” taking it as “She’s a Freak, Ow”). Oh yes, and he’s got guts: rhetorically anyway, he’s willing to take on the unassailable Beatles (“they make me feel like it’s only me, / which is so unlike what so much music does”). You may enjoy his wry take on self-involved lyricism—though the filament-filament-filament of American Introversion came long before the yeah-yeah-yeah of the British Invasion.

So what’s new here? Potscrubber Lullabies has many of the same elements as much more blah collections—strolled towns and graveyards, a kitchen window, a compost pile and wheelbarrow, a family, the eponymous Potscrubber dishwasher—but these poems do what many don’t: they are intent on and successful at leaving these scenes more memorable for the careful linguistic inspection. Normally suspicious when I hear the drumbeat of traditional forms, here I’m tempted to salute. Don’t let a few colorfully borrowed bars fool you: by the dawn’s early light, there’s something very American up at Ft. McHenry.

Note: McHenry will appear at the Virginia Festival of the Book at 2:00pm, Friday, March 23 at the UVa Bookstore. The reading will also feature poets Victoria Chang and Ann Hudson.