A Review of Painting Over the Growth Chart by Dan Rattelle
New Verse Review opens for submissions on July 1
Dan Rattelle, Painting Over the Growth Chart: Poems. Wiseblood Books, 2024.
The poet of rural New England responds not only to literal places but also to a formidable literary landscape. Robert Frost is its great surveyor, though New England had a proud poetic tradition well before the twentieth century. There are apple orchards and woodchucks in this literary landscape, stone walls spilled by “the frozen-ground-swell” and woods that are “lovely, dark and deep.” (Beware any edition that reads “lovely, dark, and deep.”) There is much wood-chopping, as in the arresting first few lines of Frost’s “The Axe-Helve,” collected in New Hampshire 100 years ago:
I’ve known ere now an interfering branch Of alder catch my lifted axe behind me. But that was in the woods, to hold my hand From striking at another alder’s roots, And that was, as I say, an alder branch. This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day Behind me on the snow in my own yard Where I was working at the chopping-block, And cutting nothing not cut down already.
Robert Lowell was another great surveyor of this landscape, as in this stanza from “For the Union Dead”:
On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
There is sugaring in the literary (and literal) New England landscape. There are workhorses pulling farm machinery or sleighs. There are oxen too. Donald Hall, who learned the literary landscape in elite schools and the dirt upon which it grew at his maternal grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, was a particularly fine poet of these draft animals. See “Ox Cart Man,” adapted into a beloved children’s book, and his heartbreaking “Names of Horses.” Alexandria Peary, current poet laureate of New Hampshire, gently ironizes the literary landscape in her “Deconstructing New England.”
There are many other excellent poets of literary New England, including Robert Shaw, who provides one of the back cover endorsements to Dan Rattelle’s new collection Painting Over the Growth Chart. “Although punctuated by some vivid ‘postcards’ from Scotland,” Shaw writes, “Dan Rattelle’s book is rooted in New England, offering a searching view of the region and its people that is unsparing yet humane.” Shaw thereby blesses a new worthy poet of this landscape.
Shaw does so for good reason. Rattelle, who hails from western Massachusetts, offers tight lyrics about some very New England tools and household objects: an axe (of course), a birch-handled broom that only rests on the Sabbath, a rocking chair in the Shaker style. These poems are all strong, but my favorite is “Rolling Pin”:
Lathe-spun, a scrap of pine from the woodshop. Sanded, oiled, dusted with flour from Montreal. It’s waiting at the bake board beside the pitcher, beside the mixing bowl. Its grains course and eddy. I press the middle and work along its length’s taper. I scrape the crust off as I go. It’s flawless, despite the knot, an accident of growth no workmanship could handle, black as the eye of a crow, her tree marked out for timber.
Note how the poem begins with the rolling pin’s workshop construction and then moves on to its use in the kitchen. It’s a poem of human craftsmanship, of woodworking and baking. But there is that “knot” still visible on the pin. The knot rolls us back out of the world of human making to the tree from which the pin’s lumber was harvested, the crow who once frequented this fated tree, her eye a simile for the knot. The rolling pin (and the poem too), despite its careful craftsmanship, still carries a mark of wildness, and we get the sense that it is “flawless” not “despite the knot” but because of it. (We get an earlier hint at this wildness in how the pin’s wood “grains course and eddy.”) Note, too, how Rattelle’s slant rhymes give this poem a subtle musicality, perhaps even an evocation of the sound of a rolling pin at work on its dough: “bowl,” “go,” “growth,” “crow.”
Painting Over the Growth Chart is mainly a collection of lyrics. There are story poems, or near story poems, such as “Self-Reliance,” about an old farmer who persisted with ox-drawn sledge and wooden taps for sugaring until “midway through the season, ’91,” and the quietly unsettling “The View From the French King Bridge,” from which many have jumped to their death. Rattelle is deeply placed but not derivative. There is a confident nod to Donald Hall in “Self-Reliance,” to Robert Lowell in “The View From the French King Bridge.”
Even these two poems are as much lyric as story, so I was surprised when, two-thirds of the way through the collection, Rattelle gives us a seven-page blank verse narrative poem. “All Rising Is By a Winding Stair” is fully formed and deftly executed with distinctive characters, persuasive dialogue, and high drama. Set in the mid-twentieth century, it is the story of a down-and-out former hockey star returning to town to make a surprising request to his long-estranged wife. Their tense exchange takes place at night, while the children sleep. I do not want to give away the plot, but I will say that while the setting and characters evoke Lowell—a working-class neighborhood, New England Catholics—the poem’s main dialogue partner is Frost. Rattelle’s poem has a strikingly original story, but it offers a variation on the theme of Frost’s great narrative “The Death of the Hired Man,” and it includes a couple of explicit allusions to help readers make the connection. Here, for instance, is Rattelle: “The moon peeked through / the curtains, then darkened as a cloud passed over.” And here is Frost:
'I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud Will hit or miss the moon.’ It hit the moon.
(Shawn Phillip Cooper points to some echoes of Frost’s “Home Burial” in the poem his review of Rattelle’s collection.) This kind of long narrative poem is too rarely written these days. I hope that Rattelle writes more of them in the years to come.
Other poems, many of them presumably drawn from the speaker’s life, bring a contemporary balance to these forays into the New England literary landscape and its past. “Labor Day” begins at a Maine wedding reception before the speaker and his beloved wander off on a trail that runs behind houses where they hear the sounds of summer holiday: “New-tapped kegs // were hissing, horseshoes clattered, someone yelled.” They eventually find themselves in deep woods, where they hear “nothing but the treefrogs.” In the collection’s title poem, the speaker paints over the fading growth chart of children he presumes are now his age: “Beer gut and grays in the drain—/ fit for this life and mortgaged into it.”
Some of the collection’s contemporary lyrics are slighter in terms of theme and complexity, reading like well-wrought exercises. This is no real shortcoming, given that many collections are made up of only such poems, not always well-wrought. But overall Painting Over the Growth Chart is excellent. Its best poems, such as the title poem, “Rolling Pin,” “Self-Reliance,” “Labor Day,” and “All Rising Is By a Winding Stair,” will stand the test of time. Rattelle has not only visited New England’s literary landscape. He has charted a few new fields and thickets in it.
If you’d like to read sample poems from Rattelle’s collection, here are links to a few in their original publication venues:
“Rocking Chair” and “Rolling Pin” in Bad Lillies
“The Bookcase” in The North American Anglican
“The Footbridge” in Modern Age
“Painting Over the Growth Chart” in First Things