More Moss Than Marble

A review of Berceuse Parish, the debut narrative poetry collection from Burnside Soleil, by Toby LeBlanc.

Louisiana has been a place outsiders have tried to decipher since Europeans encountered it in 1541. If anything, its mystique grows as you try to understand it. There are just too many peoples and cultures that have marinated together (often tragically). Landscapes can change within a mile and seem nearly contradictory. Thankfully, people like the poet Burnside Soleil won’t try to tell you about this place. He knows how to show you in his book The Berceuse International Youth League & The St. Herménégilde Society for General Upkeep & Social Benefaction Presents A Melancholic Fantasia in the Tradition of Lonely Swamp Pop, a Collage of the Culture & Peculiar History of Our Parish as Figured in the Tragicomic Soleil Family, Especially Our Unofficial Town Poet Laureate, Burnside Soleil, in Conjunction with Gus Babineaux, an Historian of Dubious Origins & Compiler of This Fine Book, Berceuse Parish from Texas Review Press. But just like any native Louisianian, it has a shortened name. We’ll call it Berceuse Parish.

As evidenced by the name, this hybrid book of poems centers around the Soleil family. The recovered poems and letters give account of their relationships in good and bad times. But it’s important to note that both language and history can be suppressed in this neck of the woods. A story about a people can be as much about what isn’t included as what is: “Our poet didn’t grow up with the history, and also had scant inheritance with French, a language systematically stymied for decades, so again, always the fusillade against plurality.” And the language is often fluid, needing translation, because “It is true that our poet’s forebears, and even his friends, spoke an idiom more moss than marble, the vocabulary warped by climate…” With this patois, the poet creates experience from language, culture from experience and clarity from the confusing contradictions of this place and people. This is displayed artistically in letters between two lovers. They pick at each other to the point it’s hard to tell if it is good-natured or not. Their letters start mostly in English and slowly transition to French. There is a sense of return in these pieces, even as the distance may be growing between them.

The pieces are shot through with mourning. Longing, regret and nostalgia are the rhythm these poems play along. But acceptance of life within this family, in this place, is the Cajun fiddle brightening the tune, turning it into music. There are moments of singular brilliance, which call to deep places within us, forcing a soul’s toe to tap in time, whether from Louisiana or not.

“There wasn’t an idyllic past lost to the mundane present
of adulthood.”

“What we need to understand
each other is often belated.”

And the poet manages to imbed this kind of veracity into the characters as well, making them three-dimensional to the point this short book carries the weight of a novel:

“Charlie Three, whose moniker is actually Charles III, wasn’t malicious, mostly guilty of narcissistic self-mythologizing, and while he worked just hard enough and loved as he could, which is to say with unremarkable friendly care…”

“I hesitate
to be declarative, but self is the first story told to us.
And what about that which isn’t narrative,
a portrait without
beginning or end—fascicles like capillaries
in a body of light?
Tell a story long enough and there goes
your whole life. This day begins my fortieth year,
and I know so little.”

In both examples, the poet carries forward personas who seem to know themselves while not knowing where they belong. Again, what is undefinable, but still knowable, is so much of what this region is about.

Time is relative, both moving and not in these poems. Our poet says, “Time is when it feels like it.” Endings are diverse sets of points along time, if they are points at all: “They watched together for a while until the father said it was almost time to go home. Not yet, but almost.” Place is also fluid with these characters. Told from that Southern perspective of rest of the world being elsewhere, beauty is often perceived as something “not here:” “He would bring buckets of them on his rare drive back to Berceuse, but these were nothing compared to tasting them right off the vine, as Nel did once he, too, fled from our parish to the plains and then the coast.” However, beauty can be the price of missing home. The residents of Berceuse Parish live with that Southern literary tradition of escape and line between finding a new life and abandoning one’s family is all a matter of where you call home.

Escape, whether geographically or emotionally, will affect important relationships. Fathers engage in varying amounts of parenting, playing with the line of “enough.” But the impressions left on the children are all the same size:

“When Uless got to Colorado and borrowed some hiking boots indefinitely and landed a job as a forest tour guide, despite being unaware of the terrain, he sat—by his own account—on some crag and surveyed the unmitigated majesty of the Good Lord’s tremendous work and realized he never should have left his kids.”

Everyone in these pages is estranged: “We come so close to things.” In these gaps, love can be just within reach, or just outside. It has liminal form which can shift with the character possessing the story. Love is something squishy, accordioning throughout the poems: “There would be a story, usually, something preposterous, and our poet would listen, and there was warmth, and there was drink, and there may have been forgiveness. It wasn’t love, but like love, and enough.”

Nature is constant here. It becomes the protector, teacher and provider in the absence of definable love. Whether on the Louisiana prairie, or the Virginia farmstead, or somewhere in Colorado, or even the Philippines, nature is present and attentive. But even here our poet can find a gap; the line between what is nature and what is human is as blurred as anything else. He makes sure neither nature nor humans work very hard to draw a boundary for the other which creates a world where they were never enemies, just like the characters in this work aren’t.

Our poet is not afraid to swim through the in-between spaces. The stories and lyrical writing contained here invites us to look at the gaps in time, place, nature and each other, and find what to fill them with. This writing reminds us how it’s our stories that matter more than history. For better or for worse they define us, often better than reality can: “It’s a myth that temperature could crackle with light. But it’s pretty, prettier than the truth, he said. A good story.”

 

Toby LeBlanc lives in Austin, Texas, and works as a mental health professional. While he and his family sleep under the Texas stars, his roots go to ground in the bayous and prairies of south Louisiana. His latest book is Soaked, a story collection that imagines Louisiana 50 years from now after climate change intensifies. Read his story “The End of the World Bar” in Deep South here.