David Mason (2) (1954–)

The Country I Remember by David Mason, 1996

This is actually a collection of poetry, but the title poem is 56 pages long and thus qualifies as a long narrative poem. The story (stories?) is told in two voices (a duologue?) -- that of Lt. Mitchell, a Union soldier who fought at the battle of Chickamaugua and was imprisoned at Libby Prison in Richmond, VA until the end of the end of the Civil War, and his daughter Maggie Mitchell Gresham, who travelled westward with her family after the Civil War from Illinois to Oregon, and later left for California, where she married a blacksmith/shopkeeper, Howard Gresham.

The father and daughter voices counterpoint throughout -- the horror of the battle and prison with the dailiness of life after the war. Both father and daughter have wanderlust -- neither want to stay in one place too long. The story strikes me as a very American experience: it could as easily be a century later -- the voices of a father from WWII and his restless daughter or a father who fought in Vietnam and his daughter -- the one coping from what we call PTSD and the other trying to find her way in the world.

The blank verse, as usual, works well for the storytelling and conversational language of the poem. The suppleness of this verse form in English seems to be nearly limitless.… (mais)