I once caught a whiff of a wet woolen
overcoat. Before you could say “Sister Mary Magdalene,”
I was transported to the winter of 1956 and a grade-school
cloakroom hung with leggings still damp from a snowy recess. The
poems in Marcellus Leonard’s new collection, Shake the Thunder Down, are strung with this
kind of visceral memory, like pearls around the neck of a beautiful
woman.
Women figure large in Leonard’s verse;
their sexuality, sensuality, and friendship are the sources of joy
and pain. Mothers, aunts, sisters, wives, belly dancers, and the
occasional muse all have roles to play. Memory conjures matriarchs
and lovers like ghosts, but these are apparitions of substance.
I’ve heard corporal punishment jokingly called the
“board of education,” but Leonard proves that words can
also hurt, putting the phrase in his mother’s mouth as a
disparaging comment in his poem “I Overheard”:
“Here comes the Board of Education,”/Mama said, when I
walked up . . . . He’s an information glut — /sitting
on his gluteus maximum.” By poem’s end, however, the pejorative has
turned to pride: “You see that boy over there,”/ . . .
“That’s my son, the professor.” A younger mother
appears in “Sunday Powder,” in which the punishment is
getting laced into her corset. Her appointment each week of a
different son “corsetier” (a nice play on
“courtier”) is by turns both comic and tender. That she
taught her son to love becomes apparent in “Deep
Crevices,” a poem written to his wife on their honeymoon.
The male line is also present in the poems.
In “Grandpa Was a Stepper” Leonard’s fast-rhyming
villanelle mimics the steps of a grandfather he met only through
legend. The haunting sonnet “Oh My Father” will speak
to many of us who have looked in the mirror only to see a
parent’s face. Most poets turn to the moon at one time or
another, often with hackneyed results. But in “My Brother
Moon” Leonard finds the image of a brother departed, a
mother’s cracked dinner plate, and the redemption of the
communion host.
It would be presumptuous of me to talk about the
African-American experience, but I can speak to the ability of language
to record what comes through in these poems — the universality of
emotion. Again and again, Leonard taps such emotion. Some of his
richest poems take their inspiration from the African side of his
heritage, growing from a trip he took to Egypt. In “Nubian
Cousins” he discovers that blood runs thick thousands of miles
from home: “Abdullah insists that I take tea/on first sight of
me. In an instant/we pick twelve thousand years/from between our teeth
with smiles.” In reading such poems I discover that even though
African-American culture is “foreign” to me, these feelings
that flow so eloquently have nothing to do with the amount of melanin
in our skin.
Leonard travels to another time and space for
his title poem, “Shake the Thunder Down.” The
Shakertown of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Ky., has been restored
for the education and enjoyment of tourists. Traveling there, the
poet is seduced by an idea many of us find appealing: to lead a
simpler life. The Shakers were celibate, and the poet finds himself
contemplating his own vow to “prelude passion,” an
alternative that, by the end of the poem, he finds he cannot make,
vowing instead to “shake the thunder down.” The passion
that dances in Leonard’s poetry proves the choice a wise one.
A book signing and reception for Marcellus
Leonard, associate professor of English at the University of
Illinois at Springfield, will be held 5-8 p.m. Thursday, Sept.
22, in the MacDonald Lounge, located on the lower level of the
Brookens Library, on the University of Illinois at Springfield
campus. The event is open to the public. Leonard is the author
of two additional volumes of poetry: Nubian
Cousins: Adventures in Verse and Cardboard Ears: The Early Poems. He has taught creative writing at UIS for 15 years.
This article appears in Sep 15-21, 2005.
