My Mother's Red Ford by Roy Bentley.
Lost Horse Press. Sandpoint, Idaho. 2020. $24.00 paper.
Roy's Shell, wooded hills, an old big screen theater, what would today be called muscle cars, a Holiday Inn, what in the military is known as a grinder, a tent of worshipers with a woman with a snake around her neck, a concrete pool behind a motel—are a few things a reader takes from My Mother's Red Ford, New & Selected Poems by Roy Bentley, whose voice is honest, direct and probing. Often eloquent. An ability to write significantly about local and national concerns, to understand the present by delving into the past, and to speak of family and God in one breath make *My Mother's Red Ford^ memorable, rewarding, a Selected Poems like no other.
As for concerns local and national, that can be expanded to international, and global. Bentley also addresses outer space, particularly the Sputnik era of explorations and the use of animals in space. In "Motorcade" he says, " The road ahead/ is a line of like-minded Korean War veterans/ motorcading to Frankfort..". That is, Frankfort, Kentucky. He goes on. "Glassed in this way, for all I know at 5, we're/ on our way to Alabama and a civil rights march." How Bentley writes about Letcher County coal towns, places he knows and in his writing wants to know. "The Bones of Appalachia" includes Neon, Kentucky, where the poet's parents lived, and he says, of a friend, "He knows they say I'm not an Appalachian." Where Bentley is from, also where his parents are from is who he is.
Bentley strives to understand by delving into a past that includes parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. "Blood Relative" begins: "Her name was Susan, and I recall she wore the look/ men wear after going to war and returning. My father had it—." In "Sass," part 7 of "The Spell for Summoning and Ending Rain," Susan herself says,
'When I was thirty-two, I kicked the windshield out of a Ford/ Roadster while being dragged to an asylum in Lexington.'
The one doing the dragging is D.V. Bentley, her brother, and the poet's great-uncle, a medical doctor. Susan and D.V. appear in others poems, too. The poets knows who he is through these people, through his parents, through his grandmother Potter, and his silences are as significant as as his words. It's as if he is saying there's the little I know and the much I don't know. His past, replete with images of people, places, things, is part of the poet's great unknown, like God.
He speaks of God and family in one breath, not always but often. One person who lends credence to this idea, the poet's grandmother Potter "wove her hair into an ashen bun/ for the Old Regular Baptist services in McRoberts, Kentucky./ I was never in attendance for what she said took place there." He writes to know. Farther along, if you will, he says "her religion..was all about mountains,/ though it claimed to be about heaven." More could be said, and is said about religion in "King of Ghosts."
In this selected, Elvis is mentioned, Ringo Star, Robert Plant, Marlon Brando, Dizzy Gillespie, and other culture notables of Twentieth Century America and poets Keats, Shelley, Rimbaud. The final section, New Poems, begins with "My Mother's Red Ford." After "some parking lot in the Afterlife/ it starts hard. Burns a quart between oil changes." Then, "if any Galaxie 500 is a Ford/ in this life, then so must it be in the life to come." Farther along, "I like to imagine her/ pulling up in that red two-door." The car salesperson says, "I can guarantee..." any reader of this poem won't forget it. That rings true for many poems in Roy Bentley's selected, with it's one constant, the poet's individuality. While there's the mention of homemade brew, what is often called moonshine, in this selected, Bentley's poetry is "straight with no chaser." To read these poems is to experience contemporary poetry at its best.
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