Trainsong, the first chapbook by Bernice Rendrick, is a chapbook to read and savor, for it brings alive a child-eyed view of life in rural Kansas in the 1930's.
In marvelous tactile poems, poet Bernice Rendrick gives us vignettes of how hard our forebears had to work and the burdens (both emotional and physical) they shouldered so that we might be here.
The opening poem "Trunk in the Attic" [p. 7] is a perfect introduction to this chapbook: both poem and chapbook offer a collection of pivotal and important memories, made real by sensory data. In "Freight Train" [p. 9] a huge train "rumbles / through my ribs". Nervous of her father's anger in "Falling Star" [p. 11] the child " crossed thresholds / stiff-shouldered as if / they were mined with explosives". In "Grandmother's Onion Sandwiches" [p. 14] her grandma teaches her to smell "the season's first green onions" and "what spring was, / the sweet rising of roots / and decaying leaves, the mud puddles".
Through out we feel how care and nurturing from the women hold together the community and the raising the children while the men folk leave as tramps of freight trains or, as in "The Five Brothers at the Family Dinner", "are torn; here, yet moving into harsh lives, / on their backs under tractors and trucks / or bailing hay".
And the poem ends with the poet's mother moving to California with her young daughters, where the poet learned to run:
over the burning sand into the surf, allowing it to pull me into the dark tunnel, learned to struggle and rise from the undertow. |
Rendrick comments:
I offer these nineteen poems as a way of telling about my early years in Kansas and some of the elements that shaped me. There was an openness to the landscape, long periods of silence, and a world with little of the influences that we have now. The clouds and the wheat fields, with their hypnotic movement, became my link to the imagination. Writing poetry helps me recall those years and make the choices in my life that are available now. The train passing through Mound Valley, the small farming town where my parents were born, were an important connection to distant places, which as children we understood extended far beyond our home. |
In the Celebration of the Muse reading, Rendrick read two poems, opening with "Freight Train" [p. 9].
Data, compared with average for four Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. Notice how little overlap there is between where poems were first published.
Chapbook title: | Trainsong | Permafrost Chapbook: The Nightmare Parable and three others. |
Median pages of poems: | 29 | 25 (20-27) |
Median number of poems: | 19 | 19 (17-20) |
Book title: | Not a poem title | A poem title for all but one book. |
Themes: | A child's perception of adults in a 1930s childhood | The other chapbooks were on less concrete topics: wisdom; inspiration; transcendence; life; death; loss. |
Vocabulary and tropes: | Direct. | Mostly direct. Only one of the four has many metaphors, similes, and obscurities, and 2 pages of notes. |
Tone: | Natural. | Natural except for one of the four that is jittery and jumpy. |
Forms: | Free verse. | Mostly Free verse. |
Initially in Bardsong | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Barrow Street | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Blue Mesa Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in The Briar Cliff Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Chiron Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Coastlines | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Collaboration of Poets and Painters | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Colombia: A Journal of Literature and Art | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in CQ | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Cream City Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Cumberland Poetry Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in DIAGRAM | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in For She is the Tree of Life | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Georgia State University Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in A Ghost at Heart's Edge | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Global City Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Hunger Mountain | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in If I Had a Hammer | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in The Journal | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Kansas Quarterly | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Kimera | Gentry | 2 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Lighthouse Point | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Margie | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in The Mississippi Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Montserrat Review | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Mot Juste | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in National Poetry Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Nimrod International Journal | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in North American Review | -- | 2 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Northwest Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in The Notre Dame Review | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Painted Bride Quarterly | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Phoebe | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Poetry New York | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Poetry Southeast | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Porter Gulch Review | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Portland Pen | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Portland Review | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Prairie Schooner | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Quarry West | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Rattle | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in RHINO | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in River City | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Smartish Pace | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Sojourn | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Sonoma Mandala | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in Verve | Trainsong. | 0 |
Initially in West Branch | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Initially in Willow Springs | -- | 1 Permafrost Chapbook Contest Winner. |
Bernice Rendrick lives near Scotts Valley, California.
She received the 2009 In Celebration of the Muse Chapbook Award, which includes publication of her chapbook Trainsong through Poetry Santa Cruz.
Her poems have appeared in various poetry journals and anthologies.
Books of Poetry Form. |
Alphabetic list of poetry forms.
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How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Rondeau. Rubáiyát. Sestina. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle. |
Other poets:
Franz Wright. Jack Gilbert. Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Len Anderson. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Nordic Skalds. Richard Hugo. W.S. Merwin. |
Copyright
© 2009-2016 by J. Zimmerman,
except for work quoted from other writers. The quoted poems are Copyright © 2009-2016 by Bernice Rendrick. |
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