cover image Sunflower County

Sunflower County

Dave Etter. Spoon River Poetry Press, $0 (441pp) ISBN 978-0-944024-24-9

The marvels and monotonies of the archetypal midwestern small town of Alliance, Ill., appear here in Etter's ( Selected Poems ) collection of 400-odd verse monologues spoken by town characters. A hefty compendium of previous volumes and new poems, this portrait of Alliance is strongly reminiscent of the epitaphs of village characters in Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915). Like Masters, Etter uncovers the private moments, lackluster routines, and the enervating, futile mood of small-town existence. His monologues are most powerful when they evoke the past or forces of nature, when they mourn lost buildings and lost artifacts--e.g., buffalo nickels--or when they underline human vulnerability, as in a farmwife's monumental rage in ``Foreclosure.'' Etter's best poems are insightful regional performances that invoke prairie life. Yet the collection suffers from a surfeit. Too many poems repetitiously dwell on youthful sexual frustration, and too many fail to transcend the trivial--animal crackers, bubble gum, blackboard scrawls. Etter's style is commendably simple and direct, with jazzy overtones, but too often it verges into the pedestrian (``Let me count the ways''). (July)