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Poetry Review: Arriving at the Riverside

By RT Castleberry

Reviewed by P McRae

 My first encounter with RT Castleberry   was after  my first poetry reading at the Hard Thymes Soup Kitchen in  Houston almost thirty years ago.  At this point, he is the only one remaining who remembers me as a budding author, editor….newly divorced mom with 3 kids.

 ‘Y’know, kiddo that line Tupperware heaven was a cheap shot in that poem you read,’ he slid up behind me, bent and whispered in my ear.  All I can remember was staring down at the coke with peanuts he was drinking (not knowing  how heavily laced with rum it was until later) and thinking, ‘Gee he drinks it just like folks back home in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas; maybe this won’t be so bad after all’.  I was still trying to recover from my panic of having actually gotten up and read at a poetry reading.  About that time a ruckus started on the other side of the room and I saw a tall black man with a chair over his head  threatening a shorter black man yelling at him that he wouldn’t know a good poem if it bit him in the ass.   Castleberry didn’t read that first time I met him but we caught up with each other at a Rice University reading a couple of weeks later. He blew me away, both with the quality of his poetry and the dynamism of his performance. Meanwhile I learned that RT was only 21 and considered the enfant terrible of the Houston Poetry Scene and was already on his way to becoming the gifted and exquisite poet he is today.  I also learned that the two men  who had engaged in a ‘battle of words’ were as it turned out well-known Houston street poet, Edgar Jones and nationally known poet, ethnomusicologist, and jazz lover,  Lorenzo Thomas. Little did I know what an important part  these 3 poets would play in my life as a poet, radio producer/director, small press publisher and literary event organizer over the next thirty years.

Pastoral, bucolic poetry has just never been my cup of tea but I adore surrealistic poetry and literature with its treatment of tension and conflict often being the subtext beneath a driving narrative. The question for me was always how does one blend or reconcile the two. RT Castleberry is one of the few American poets, in my opinion, who does it so well.  And this chapbook, published by one of the finest small press publishers, Finishing Line Press,  shares with us  a graceful, gritty, subtle perspective weaving nature’s role in shaping the city geographically and culturally. Yet this is not sweet or bucolic poetry , rather it is a poetry filled with the diverse shadings of Houston shifting, expanding and contracting historically, geographically and culturally.  Castleberry is those rarest of persons, a native Houstonian who has also been a confirmed Houston urbanite all his life. One gets a taste of this in the first poem (and title of the chapbook), Arriving at the Riverside.

The building wind of a winter storm

Drains the day of migrating birds,

Draws smoke and spark from chimney fires,

Draws blue iced clouds to pine top height.

Living in Houston is also living with water as a constant in your life: the Gulf Coast at Galveston an hour away; hurricanes that puts Houston always at risk with its beneath sea level geography and rife with bayous as well as the lack of water that brings the drought. A Man in Silence provides an even edgier example of blending nature and the surreal existence of people. In the first two stanzas the reader is treated to a narrative painting a clear photo of space and circumstance, then the poet comes slamming home in the 3^rd stanza:

Traveling in the trade-off

Between failure and forgiveness,

I taste my drink on a flight east from Dresden.

His body burned, ashes scattered

On the Elbe, in the sandstone mountains,

Memories of my brother

Rest mired and muddied by dice and Jack Daniels.

I remember a pistol stashed in a desk drawer,

A loose pile of coins and cash, Lucky Strikes and a lighter.

Then as the poet changes his face more to that of the story teller or griot, Castleberry does it again in the poem (Carry Me) Beyond the River Bridge:

We were raised for resentment and a bully’s rule.

Without wit, in whispers,

We make our history a story we‘ll command.

Then in the last stanza, Castleberry brings the reader closer to the personal

Lazy, charming,

My brother was ruined by a fetish

For theft, acid and easy avocations.

In an interesting tour de force, Castleberry adopts a more Robert Service style in NightHawk as he tells the story of Silvio, ‘..a cotton farmer’s kid’ shifting back and forth between the drudgery of civilian life and the dangerous, yet coming alive feel of being a soldier.

In Leaving Alexandria, Castleberry returns to the theme of lost relationships in the lyrical first 4 lines of stanza two

I have wandered my history, to no good purpose---

Every mistake I’ve made crowds me in my sleep.

I recall every grievance, each discourtesy,

Rooms I’ve entered to win or wound someone softer.

And then in A Winter in Exile Castleberry reprises the theme of war, loss and soldiers

The Spanish novelist trembles as he packs.

“This is not my cause, my country,” he says.

“I have no wife, no creed,

No duties but the bullwhip

And a poor man’s riddle.”

“You run,” I tell him, “as if each battle,

each bride in birth is a requiem.

They are mathematical amusements.

They are the clatter of sculpted birds

Blessed by iman, by rabbi.”

There is much for the poet to say about what is happening in today’s world but not many are doing so. It is as if it is too hard, too painful to hold that mirror up to our faces. Castleberry does it with style and grace. 

Publication date is January 15, 2010 and pre-sale ordering runs Oct. 9-Nov. 20, 2009. It can be ordered directly from Finishing Line Press   P.O. Box 1626. Georgetown, KY 40324

 

 Finishing Line Press

pp 23

ISBN: 1-59924-500-0

Copyright RT Castleberry 2010

Copyright Patricia McRae 2009