For over forty years, J. D. Carpenter has lived in and around Prince Edward County. A Road through the Corn: Prince Edward County Poems, 1982-2022 attests to his felt sense of connection to the landscape and, especially, to the people who live and die here.

Focused on County scenes and characters, the voice and subjects of these poems can remind one of Joe Horn, the hard-boiled newspaperman of Mr. Carpenter’s series of County detective novels: hardscrabble characters delivered with a sometimes gruff directness.

But here, in the poetic mode, the metaphors are not cliched, and the expressions more open to ambiguity. “Monologue at Giant Tiger” offers an ostensibly overheard account of a barn fire. The farmer finds “inside, the steel / sheets are curling down / like paper,” a metaphor given power by its return in the psyche: “Three nights I couldn’t / sleep, and when I did / I dreamed about / the curling sheets of steel.”

Familiar locations are recollected and recreated so that the reader sees them anew. The site of the Adolphustown Methodist Church is commemorated in “The Drownings,” a researched account of a fatal boating accident in 1819. To this day we can still look out from the same shore, but Carpenter’s distillation of the event that cost ten lives changes our relation to the landscape, as we hear voices “hymn-singing in the distance / turn to screams.”

Throughout, human culture is the framework for understanding the natural. A dog can be likened to a Jet Ski, or “the forest floor is library-dry, library-still,” or the moon is “like a single bulb / against the black ceiling of the night.”

There is always a figure in the landscape here, most often the poet himself, finding meaning in his surroundings in a manner akin to that of Wordsworth, although less performative and grandiose. Rather than offer universal philosophy for all time, Mr. Carpenter is content with the near-term:

when, an hour later, we walked

out of the woods, across the meadow,
and down the hill to our house,

we were whole again, or almost,
and ready for the rest of the day.

Nonetheless, each vignette here renders a lasting truth.

The poem that gives this collection its title ostensibly questions the collection’s melding of the human and the natural:

To the children of the farmer who works
my land (whose corn this is), there is no need

for comparisons – corn to silk or soldiers:
things are what they appear to be.

The poet distinguishes the owner from the worker of the land, insisting upon the difference. “Everything interests them … / but there are / no levels of meaning, only the article itself.” But can this be true? The poem does not answer this question directly, but challenges the reader not to find meaning in the articles themselves: “a baby asleep on her father’s arm; a dead boy’s / handsome colour cameo; a road through the corn.”

J. D. Carpenter’s A Road through the Corn (2022). (Chris Fanning)

The final section takes up the same challenge differently, presenting “List Poems,” which are exactly that. Not exactly “found” poems, for they are carefully ordered (perhaps alphabetically, but often sonically) catalogues of items or words associated by circumstance: grave markers in the churchyard imply a family or community narrative; “County Roads,” when organized by sound, draw attention not to geography so much as the culture’s naming practices, sometimes literal, sometimes allusive.

But even the more descriptive or narrative poems benefit from listing, whether the simple recitation of the names of horses (perhaps inspired by Donald Hall), or in the creation of readerly expectations. “John’s Barbershop” portrays a lively scene on a December afternoon at this Picton hub. The poem’s listing breaks its lines to make for a shock: “Michelle and Elaine wear reindeer / antlers, necklaces of coloured bulbs, / and Covid masks.”

Mr. Carpenter says that his next collection will be a book of list poems.

These forty years’ worth of poems offer a consistent vision, based in the social, of a common beloved object: Prince Edward County.

Mr. Carpenter’s recent books are published by Cressy Lakeside Books. They are available at Books & Company and The Local Store.

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