Prairie Roots was recently reviewed in Highland Park Poetry, August 1, 2024, by poet Kathryn Haydon (reprinted below).
"To open Prairie Roots by James Lowell Hall is to step over the threshold of a family home-place, specifically of the house depicted in a black and white photo on the collection’s first page. The opening poem, 'On Her Birthday,' is a gracious host holding the door wide with welcome as we walk on in.
Hall’s collection of poems, including prose vignettes and photographs, weaves a memoir of family generations that have spent time in this Delavan, Illinois prairie home. Yet beyond the family itself, it carries a relatable history of small-town prairie life in the early- to mid-1900s.
Lowell’s grandfather, Ray Lillibridge, was sent from the Dakotas to this little town in Illinois at age fourteen to become a carpenter’s apprentice. His family could no longer afford to care for him. He worked his way to become the primary contractor in town, courted the author’s grandmother Marguerite, and built the family home with his own two hands.
The book captures personal moments, such as the couple’s first dinner as newlyweds. Food descriptions throughout the collection made my mouth water as I thought about farm-fresh strawberries, corn, and chickens:
. . . strawberry shortcake, which mother made
with soft strawberries from our garden,
rose-red, to this day makes my lips tingle.
('First Home-Cooked Meal' p. 33)
The book also includes researched history delivered through poems like 'From the Delavan Tri-County Times' which depicts the magic of a snowy, small-town Christmas:
All trains late Christmas Eve,
Christmas Day, clear with a bright mantle of snow.
Sleighing and coasting revived,
but sleighs have not entirely ousted
the autos, for the latter flounder
through the snow in search of traction,
like pigs deep in mud.
Hall also shares moments of humor. I laughed out loud when I reached the end of his poem about the purchase and installation of “the biggest bathtub in all of Delavan” in the poem 'Saturday Ritual':
. . . Ray brought
Grams over to see the bathroom, said,
Etsie, Dad’s name for Grams,
You are going to be the first one
taking a bath in this tub. She loved it,
not having a bathroom in her house.
And soon, Saturday afternoons,
the whole family came—for bath day. (p. 39)
The style and construction of this book brought to mind a favorite of mine, Carver: A Life in Poems by Marilyn Nelson (Wordsong, 2001), a biography of inventor George Washington Carver spun through poems. Hall’s book is similar in that the poems construct a narrative about an individual family in the context of the times in which they lived.
I enjoyed the narrative style of Hall’s poems, though in some cases felt that the author could have been less liberal with filler words and could have taken more care in establishing line breaks. His poems are fairly consistent in form, but midway through the book we are treated to a surprise with 'Time to Thresh' in a layout that highlights the poet’s lyrical side. Sometimes I wasn’t sure who was narrating a particular poem—was it the poet himself or a different family member? More than once I had a hard time following the book’s timeline.
Those technicalities aside, Hall’s collection is engaging and relatable. The poem 'Black Thursday' captures the shock of the 1929 bank failures as it describes the garden bounty of food the children tried to sell door-to-door as their father’s business dried up. This poem reminds me of my own grandfather who was born several years after the Hall’s mother, in rural Indiana. My grandfather talked extensively about his service in World War II, but one day I realized that he never mentioned the Depression. Why? I asked him. He responded that they had very few material needs that they couldn’t supply from their own hard work and farm, so the Depression didn’t much alter their normal quest for survival.
If you’re a reader who enjoys books like Willa Cather’s My Antonia, this collection is one that will transport you back to a time of hard work, small-town camaraderie, and the importance of family.
The final poem will make you think. It is jarring and stark, contrasting the dirt-on-your-hands farming of Hall’s ancestors with the mechanized, fertilized situation in much of the rural Midwest today. Perhaps it builds on this Depression-era theme of self-sufficiency, contrasting our over-processed food with those juicy red strawberries from the garden. Which world is sustainable? Which version will we steward for our children? The book’s final words may give you a chill, with a bit of hope:
The Sun in the heartland sets far away,
unscreened by city lights. Through the night’s
vibrant stars, a milky sky-river
beacon, rises like a ladder.
('Prairie Sunset' p.128)"
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Kathryn Haydon is an award-winning poet, non-fiction writer, and educator. She serves on the board of East on Central and is a member of Illinois State Poetry Society and Poets & Patrons. Her latest book is the poetry collection Unsalted Blue Sunrise: Poems of Lake Michigan.
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