Saturday in Review: Eric Walker reviews NCLR Poetry Editor Jeffrey Franklin’s latest collection Where We Lay Down in NCLR Online Fall 2022.
Winding up the reviews from our first Fall online issue is our very own Poetry Editor Jeffrey Franklin’s collection, reviewed by Eric C. Walker, who writes, “Jeffrey Franklin still finds his figures of poet and homely muse in the fields and healing woods of North Carolina.”
Walker points out all kinds of references and antecedents to Franklin’s poems here. There are geographical markers: “The question of home plays out in the book within a remarkable geographical range; poems take place in or recall multiple locations in Australia and Ireland and a cross-section of the US: Colorado, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, and, in several poems, North Carolina, where Franklin studied as an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill and later lived during his early professional career in the English department at East Carolina University.” There are also references to many other poets and writers.
“In his second poetry collection… Franklin offers thirty-nine poems, most of which have previously appeared in journals, some as early as 1997. Collected in book form, those poems now gather in six headed sections: “Fathers and Sons,” “Making Love,” “Making War,” “Homing,” “Totem Animals,” and “Full Emptiness.” Walker mentions how none of the poems are dated, so putting them into thematic containers is the poet’s way of bringing an order to the collection. While not strictly necessary, it is helpful to the reader.
Read the rest of the review online and buy the book.
