Even Shorn

Milton concludes "Lycidas," his great pastoral elegy, with the sudden appearance of the pastoral elegist, a youth with no audience but trees and running water: "Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills, / While the still morn went out with sandals grey." This moment epitomizes, for me, the Western tradition of pastoral poetry, and of pastoral elegy in particular. My collection began as a series of elegies, written for the many dead of my family, in the historically unremarkable Black Patch region of Western Kentucky. They, like Lycidas, often died with no witness but the natural world. They, like Lycidas, are deeply mourned. But unlike Lycidas, my aunts and uncles do not die innocently and are not naively mourned. The lived experience of the country-of poverty, of agriculture, of intense localit- does not exist outside time. It is cruel. It deserves its brutal elegy. Its songs with teeth