Living in the Resurrection

T. Crunk

It has been a century since the Yale Series of Younger Poets published its first book. They have been of inconsistent quality over the years, but they do tend to release more books that shine than they do books that thud. Living in the Resurrection, the 1994 selection introduced by the mighty James Dickey, is definitely one of the former.

Crunk, born and raised in backwoods Kentucky in a highly Baptist family, draws (as most poets do) on his childhood for much of what he writes, though the poems never take on that “confessional” feel one gets from the Beats, for example; instead, Crunk invests his work with a quiet power, a willingness to say his piece and let the images that form in our heads do all the real talking. In other words, Crunk has a real understanding of what poetry is, rather than taking it and attempting to use it as a tool to do whatever it is he wants to do.

“The river is a wound in the earth.
The river is the clay-red blood of love
pulling its silence through us....

And the soul is a small glass boat setting out.”
(“Baptism”)

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book is its middle section, comprised of pieces of what is now termed “flash fiction,” that proves Crunk can more than ably take his poetic voice and transfer it to the fictive form, keeping the work just as image-oriented and compelling:

“My mother said later that, to the shovel operators, we must have looked like some delegation from out of town that couldn't find the picnic. Or else the funeral. Not so bad my brother and me jumping the fence, or my father, but then my mother, and all of us helping my grandfather over, and finally my grandmother deciding she wanted to see, too.” (“Visiting the Site of One of the First Churches My Grandfather Pastored”)

Wonderful, readable work, and the heralding of a fine new talent.