The Possibilities of Poetry

Arkana contributor Jennifer Schomburg Kanke publishes a new collection

The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had
By Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
Book Review by Eulea Kiraly

If anyone doubts what a writer can do with poetry, they’d be well-advised to have a look at Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had. In a slim, beautifully produced volume by Kelsay Books, Kanke shows us just how effective the genre can be as narrative, biography, and cultural history.

The wife of the title is Kanke’s late paternal grandmother, born in the Ohio River Valley in an autumn of “blossoming asters and golden rod. / The war is over, the war is yet to come.” Like most of the poems in this collection, “Enid, Called Granny” is date stamped. This device helps the reader track Enid’s life through her girlhood in the Great Depression, her marriage WWII, and beyond. So too does the division of the poems into three roughly chronological sections: “First Love,” “ The Husband,” and “Enid, Herself.”

In the opening poem, “Scioto County Boom Time,” Kanke locates us in the time after the glory days of Appalachian coal prosperity when “ivy-trained men” sold off the furnaces and the land, where eventually “someone cleaned it enough for a Wal-Mart, for Oxy and pill mills, / singing loud hillbilly elegies just for political benefit.” In contrast with such hillbilly elegies, this collection is a quiet and understated ode, full of familial love, respect, and gentle humor.

Kanke is adept at weaving into her poems the rich natural world of “forests chartreuse with the riots of sassafras, oak, and young buckeyes” and the plain speech of the region. In “Best Behave Now,” Enid watches her friend Lucille swinging from the rafters in the school locker room after a basketball game

naked as a jaybird, laughing
like a woodpecker in the fall.
Teammates hooted, egged her on.

Further such authenticity is found in her eleven-part poem “Scenes from the Flood.” Here Kanke details the community response to the devastating flood of the Ohio River that left nearly 35,000 people homeless in the wet winter of 1937 – long before cell phones and FEMA. But the local history is never far from Enid’s experience of it; she “wants to walk the rail bridge to Kentucky, / see the current / through the slats, / dare it to take her on.”

Rituals of courtship – county fairs, Beggars Night balls, school bus rides – give way to marriage, motherhood, and managing on her own when Enid’s husband LeRoy joins the Marines and leaves for the Pacific near the end of WWII. It is from his letters that Kanke takes her title,“If I don’t ever see you again, don’t feel bad about it,/ for you were the swellest wife anyone ever had.” \The “aw-shucks” tone says more about the husband than it does his wife. So do the four short poems all entitled “That LeRoy is Such a Card.” The surface lightness belies the seriousness of his return with a Purple Heart, lost hearing, and what we now call PTSD. Ten years after his return, Leroy dies of cancer, leaving Enid widowed, not yet 40. The second half of her life is hastily covered in the final third of the collection, with whole decades silent and Enid invisible except to immediate family.

Kanke is fluent with a range of poetic forms including the villanelle, its rhythm and rhyme creating both the lighthearted “Enid Does the Work of Two” and the somber “Mama Says, If the Cancer Don’t Kill Him, She Just Might.” Her short poems, such as “Marcescence After First Love” pack an emotional punch and leave the reader with time to consider the weight of a moment in Enid’s life.

The oak tree clings to dry, dead leaves
all through the winter months
and even now as spring comes on,
she will not let them go.

But Kanke’s most favored form is the sonnet. She uses the structure of those fourteen lines to compress the rich specific detail of “Losing It” and conflicting emotion in “Our Lord and Savior 4-F,” two of three poems about the mental health crisis of Enid’s adult son John.

Though there is little mention of Appalachian music in the content of Kanke’s poems, her use of rhythm, rhyme, and repetition alludes to the call-and-responses, ballads, and hymns of the region. Recurring titles do the same. These variations-on-a-theme also give readers a chance to reflect on the patterns and meaning of their own lives, in both their routines and life-changing moments.