Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, Booker's Point is a debut collection of narrative poems celebrating the cantankerous Maine character Bernard Booker, Tree Warden of the Town of North Berwick and self-proclaimed Mayor of Ell Pond. Resting comfortably in the tradition of Robert Frost and E.A. Robinson, Megan Grumbling's poems speak in well-crafted blank verse of a WiFi-free rural life where trees are identified by sight (not Google images) and stones are harvested from the land by touch. Booker is a crotchety old scavenger and hoarder--gathering the discarded tools of loggers, abandoned whiskey crocks and jugs, and the gears and drives of weed-covered stone-crushing machines.
The poems' narrator shadows her yarn-spinning teacher, who is wise in the ways of the woods, but as one of Booker's childhood friends recalls in "License," "Numb as a post, as schooling went--/ numbers he got, but Jesus how/ the kid would squint at alphabets." When it comes to the land, the forest, the tending of his property, however, Booker knows plenty. In "Good Digging," for example, the narrator marvels at his practical know-how: "When most folks dig a hole, it seems to shrink/ as they go down. But he's not done it wrong/ yet, learned dirt symmetries enough to sink/ his johns and ditches straight... it's the last two feet can lame/ you. Gotta loosen it up as you go." With clear homage to Frost (she won the Robert Frost Foundation Award in 2004), Grumbling captures both the characters and lessons of the countryside, where, as she ends "Blueberrying," "The best picking/ is work, bright with abandon, both hands full." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.