PRAIRIE ROOTS
by James Lowell Hall
A physician honors his matrilineal history in this poetry collection.
Hall’s collection serves as an homage to his mother Ruth’s family and the legacy of their nearly 110-year-old home in Delavan, Illinois, which is still owned by the family and opened every holiday season by the author. Starting at the dawn of the 20th century, Hall chronicles the lives of his maternal grandparents, Ray and Marguerite Lillibridge, as they endure famine, war, and loss, marry, and build the house—called the Lillibridge House—in which they raise their seven children. Some poems are told in from a third-person omniscient perspective, but most inhabit the points of view of Hall’s family members, particularly Ruth. Family letters and photos are used throughout to punctuate these emotional beats, which attempt to balance a rosy nostalgia for a bygone Midwestern, semi-rural life with the realities of the Great Depression (“Black Thursday”) and humanity’s vulnerability to nature’s whim (“No money to build houses. / If barns and silos need repair, / folks try to fix it themselves, / before hiring Dad, then asking / him to put their bills on the books”). Stray dogs are likened to “tramps,” a local minister opposes a school dance, bedpans are used, and “hoboes” prepare for prairie fires. Beyond the family is an eclectic cast of neighbors, including Mrs. Stewart, the kleptomaniac, and Ike Diekhoff, the iceman. Hall eventually inserts himself into this layered narrative when he is born into the family, but he is at his most compelling elegizing the past.
The thesis for this collection can be found in the poem “Center of the World,” situated at the volume’s midpoint: “A small house, on a quiet street, / in a small town, built a century ago… place where the past, and thoughts / beyond remote memory of the past, / awaken from shadow.” In his acknowledgments, Hall casts his mother as the family’s oracle; naturally, he plays the role of archivist. What has been preserved is largely positive: Ray and Marguerite’s courtship and marriage, ample family meals around a table, Ruth and her sisters vowing not to marry far from their family unit. These memories are punctuated by spare, pastoral imagery, like the “pale gold” of grain fields and “apples fresh off the tree.” And as these details paint a clear salt-of-the-earth, Whitmanesque picture, the reader wonders about the darker side of bearing witness to such a tumultuous time; poverty and homelessness appear but never truly penetrate the family’s narrative. There is a passage from “Walking Back in Time” about Delavan’s history as an Underground Railroad stop (“Hundreds of enslaved folks passed // through Delavan to freedom / on the Underground Railroad. Abraham / Lincoln walked these streets, / working as a circuit lawyer”), but Hall refrains from delving into the racial dynamics of the time (or gender issues, for that matter). This is not a work concerned with universalizing familial dynamics and memories. Hall ultimately succeeds in aligning his stanzas like the sturdy beams of a house, sheltering stories past and yet to come.A family’s story set to verses that showcase both the strengths and weaknesses of nostalgia.