The Regret Histories: Poems

by Joshua Poteat

This powerful and provocative new installment of poetry is a recipient of the 2014 National Poetry Series Prize, as chosen by Campbell McGrath. The National Poetry Series’s long tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets delivers another outstanding collection of poetry by Joshua Poteat.Through an investigation of the haunted spaces where history collides with the modern southern American landscape, The Regret Histories explores themes of ruin and nostalgia, our relationship to a collective past, and the extraordinary indifference of time to memory.For thirty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Marie Howe, and Sherod Santos.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 8, 2015

Reviews

[Peycho Kanev]

DEPARTMENT OF ACOUSTIC APPLIANCES

I listen to July on the bricks, the weeds growing tall
below the heat. At the bottom of the hill,
three metal bands in the old box factory
churn out their simultaneous reliquaries,
sped-up prayers to no one in particular.
It is always postwar here.
Some days I want to give it all back,
this house, the neighborhood, the city,
to the silt and the wolves, the long flocks
of the sea folded and alluvial inside the clay.
But that’s not my decision. Instead, I turn
the porch light on for the spider, the bulb
brings gnats and soon the whole web is alive
and shining, as if evening could only begin
with these small deaths. Instead, I buy outdoor
furniture, citronella, gas for the mower, which is
the opposite of giving it back. I throw seed
to the pigeons because the whip-poor-wills of my youth
are now pigeons, no more chuck-will’s-widow
through the low pines, signaling down the meadow
and the years, a living radio mouthing news to the wind,
quarried from the architecture of some child’s song
in an old dead time. It isn’t enough, but I’ll take
what I can get. Look, there I am, a man
bent at fixing himself somewhere, in the space
between our being and the earth that is.

[Steve]

I'm not sure how I feel about this collection. Stylistically, the poems are long and dense for my taste. Even after reading and rereading 3 or 4 times, I never really felt like I "got" the meaning of any poem. And that's a difficult, unpleasant feeling for little old intellectual me.

But while I couldn't reach a clear interpretation to the poems, I found really deep and emotional sense of place--both in terms of the South in general and Richmond specifically. The overarching ideas being that the present is built upon the bones of the past and that the sins of the past will eventually come to the surface to swallow us. Because as our old friend Faulker would remind us, the past is never dead--it's not even past.

[Haines Eason]

Of the Southern mystical tradition (the Wrights, Stanford, etc.), and full of “wow” if at times without scaffolding. Almost an apologia (for which in general I have little patience), but one for all of us (humanity) and some of us (whites) before which judge it’s hard to say (sentient, collective nature and/or history, maybe?). It’ll be interesting to see what history does to voices like this...

[Colin]

You ever read the first half of a book of poetry and think, “wow, these are really good,” but then you read the second half and your head and heart and guts are just filled to spilling with how good these longer poems are? That’s this book.

[danielle; ▵]

Man, did I find that animals poem tiring.

[Brian Wasserman]

Review:

Great Cover..Ominous posturing, but no real profit from the delivery, an undistinct work.

DEPARTMENT OF PURCHASE & DISEASE

Ghost in the yard, early morning,
the hammock swinging on its own. Rather,
I saw myself reflected in the window
and wanted it to be a ghost, early morning,
the hammock filled with wrens.
Any sign would be enough.
The childhood fear returns, you’re thinking,
nostalgia buried within, held to the shallows,
but it’s more complicated.
This is 1900.
There are many things to purchase.
There’s more than just dying here.
Disease is a good enough excuse,
but this isn’t disease.
We just don’t know we’re changing,
or what we’re changing into.

[Ward Howarth]

The reigning subject matter of this rewarding volume of poetry is the city of Richmond, Virginia (where both Joshua & I currently reside). The work is both delicate and formidable; refreshingly clear in its pointed reflections of a city's storied history and yet unabashedly savage in its condemnation of less forgivable events. Lines like "This neighborhood could kill me if it wanted to" and "Ruin can mean anything you want it to mean" bring to mind the idea that even with all the decay and change Richmond has endured, the history is still there, burrowed deep into its marrow, whether we care to acknowledge it or not. Challenge yourself with this collection, however, and you'll be presented with a rich, complex view of Richmond's history that's absolutely something to savor and revisit.

[John Williams]

One of the best poetry books I've read this year, 'The Regret Histories' is so beautifully dense, so layered in weighty images frequently punctured by conceptual insight that I had to return to each poem multiple times to even begin to grasp them in their entirety. Poteat has a true gift of weaving together focused narrative imagery and larger human concerns in a surprisingly intimate way. This is definitely one of those books I'll return to every year or so, undoubtedly discovering more layers each time.

[Marina Ruby]

Dark and full of a soft haunting, The Regret Histories seems to borrow from the ego-centric melodrama that fueled Sylvia Plath's own work, with lines like "I saw myself reflected in the window and wanted it to be a ghost," "I knew right then the earth loved it more than me," "My neighbor found a human hip bone in his crawl space. Not mine, but might as well be." Swift in it's movement, gentle in its own sorrow, beautiful in language and image, The Regret Histories is a book full of a pretty sort of ache and pity.

[birdmaddgirl]

it is not poteat's fault that i am getting bored with christopher smart style poems - how did smart become a great pop song i want a break from anyway? solid collection. 3.5, rounding up to account for my orneriness.