PONDICHERRY SQUARE: A MEMOIR IN POETRY
By Amanda Surkont 
64 pp.
Little Pear Press, 2009. Paperback. $15 

Poetry books about ordinary folks in small Maine towns seem near to becoming a genre.  

The fountainhead, of course, was Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poetic portraiture of now-famous characters such as Richard Cory, Miniver Cheevy, and Eben Flood in “Tilbury Town,” which was Robinson’s fictionalization of Gardiner, Maine. Recent contributions to the type include Robert Chute’s Settling In (2008), which gives poetic expression to early settlers of New Marblehead, now Windham, Maine; Donald Crane’s Down East (2008), a chapbook of subtle studies of characters in his region of Maine; and Lewis Turco’s The Green Maces of Autumn: Voices in an Old Maine House (2002), which depicts people who in various eras had connections with a farm near Maine’s Dresden Mills. 

Now comes Amanda Surkont with a poetry book about people she remembers in a small Maine town, apparently Bridgton. The back cover reveals that “in Pondicherry Square, her first book of poetry, she honors the spirit, wisdom, and grit of the town where she grew up.” (The back cover adds, “She now lives in Vermont.”) In the front matter, she herself says, “The memories and events reflected in these poems are real. Some of the people have been given fictitious names and identifying characteristics.”    

Reading this book, however, may more readily bring to mind depictions of small-town folk in non-Maine settings. 

For example, Andy Griffith’s Mayberry in the television series may seem more closely related. In place of such appealingly folksy locals as Aunt Bee, Barney Fife, and Gomer, Ms. Surkont gives us Mona Belle Bean, Coot Wills, and Uncle Poot. In some of the poems she also gives us a similar sort of cornpone language, with dropped g’s and words such as “hisself,” “pictur’” and “partic’ly.” 

Or you might find this book’s content reminiscent of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon yarns. Something sad as well as humorous emerges in Surkont’s depictions of people, as in his. One can almost hear his poetically oleaginous voice reading passages of hers such as this: 

There all she does is sit in a place where the leaves of all
the falls she has known are piled up. And it is all the falls
because she has lived in this house for eighty-three years
And she remembers in the beginning she simply cut the grass . . . . 

Or you might find this book reflective of the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, whose depictions of rural lives in southern Illinois came in the same era as Robinson’s work. Surkont writes in a kind of prosy free verse, as Master’s did, rather than in Robinson’s more formal style. And also like Masters, she often lets characters tell their own stories and reveal their own distresses. 

The everyday-life concerns of characters in small towns can make for fascinating poetry, and Ms. Surkont’s book is a welcome addition to the “genre.” But I wish she had been more original, had given us something more, in terms of insight, perspective, or form, than we already have from Mayberry, Spoon River, and Lake Wobegon.

Gerald George is a writer and editor in East Machias, Maine, who has published extensively in books and periodicals. Several of his poems and reviews appeared in earlier issues of Wolf Moon Journal.