Village Prodigies

Rodney Jones

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780544960107
• eBook ISBN:
  9780544960138
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

A book from the award-winning poet that "bursts with anecdotes and experiences . . . its poems inhabit the psychology and mythology of this Southern town" ( St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

Village Prodigies imagines the town of Cold Springs, Alabama, from 1950 to 2015 and unfurls its narrative reach as six boys—prodigies and swains—grow up and leave the familiarity of home and the rural South.

Yet all prodigies, all memories, all stories inevitably loop back. Through a multiplicity of points of view and innovative forms, Rodney Jones plays with the contradictions in our experience of time, creating portals through which we travel between moments and characters, from the interior mind to the most exterior speech, from delusions to rational thought. We experience Alzheimer's and its effect on family, listen to family lore and read family Facebook posts, relive war, and revive half-forgotten folktales and video games. In this deep examination of personal and communal memory, Jones blurs the lines between analog and digital, poetry and prose.

"A novel in language as dense and lush and beautiful as poetry . . . [or] a book of poetry with the vivid characters and the narrative force of a novel? Whatever you care to call it, it's a remarkable achievement." —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

"Wonderfully rich and dense; an adventure, a trip, an engrossing read, a Southern golden book of words." —C.D. Wright, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet

"Any James Dickey connoisseurs or fans of the films of David Lynch or Chris Nolan will feel right at home on these pages . . . This is a gorgeous, thought-provoking, and evocative book of narrative poetry." — Booklist

The Secret Order of the Eagle

XIV (The Stutterer Seth Portis)

Sweet tooth, goldilocks, apple

of his mother’s stink-eye, desperate

for attention, but too shy

to cry when the blacksmith

grabs and swings him by his ears,

he takes solace in the swaddling

roar of the party that conceals him.

When he follows the older kids

to play hide-and-go-seek,

he sneaks back. All ears.

He never cries near

big people. He listens.

He does not learn.

He becomes them.

The way they drink iced tea

when the game draws close,

and when the noise

goes deeper in the woods,

they switch to beer.

He sees how, when they speak,

they forget each other.

It is his favorite game. Hide-

and-go-seek. He does not need

to be discovered to know

he will be It. It is

his special power, invisibility.

He is only famous

while hidden.

XV

Fat little Dudley chanted his name and printed it in block on his binder cover:

at first, just MANN;

and later—on books, on baseball gloves, on biceps and oaks—

BIG MANN

Prefecture, license, leverage, mode that carried him.

He marked its heft and shine up close,

the way it gripped the road and cornered: a champagne

Jaguar, a yellow Harley, chopped

with raised chrome handlebars. He drew

the sleekness of the seat and gas tank, specular

pipes curving from the manifold. And saw

his name flash as if published on storefront glass:

the aviators, the Nazi helmet; and girls behind

him, each day a different girl—some blond,

some black—each a lens that made him larger,

but each a little less like mother. Calling “Dudley, Dudley—”

she could hear him when he got like that, explosion

after explosion since his father passed. Like he was steel.

Sometimes she said she thought he was a motor:

one gear, no going back, no change as he got older.

He grew and sang the mash. He sang the monster mash.

XVI (On a Warm Day in Late July, in the Lot Across from Cleon Portis’s Barn, Lonely Luck, Seth Portis, Jawaharlal Mills, Mack Mack, Dudley Mann, and George Brown Play Pitch, Discuss What Is on Their Minds Regarding a Book by J. Edgar Hoover, Arrive at a Fateful Decision to Form a Club, Decide to Refer to Each Other by Last Names Only, and Swear a Blood Oath)

Observe that the ball they toss is the center of a regulation ball, wrapped tightly in kite string and covered with electrical tape.

That the position of each boy in the circle and who throws to whom is a matter of health and personal security.

That, on the recommendation of Lonely Luck and Seth Portis, who have checked out every book in the Cold Springs Elementary School Library, each boy has attempted to read J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It.

That Jawaharlal Mills would prefer The Giants of Science, that Dudley Mann tends to detective fiction.

That Mack Mack reads Lou Gehrig: Pride of the Yankees, and George Brown The Island Stallion.

That the library is small, that, behind the atlases, Lonely Luck has discovered a picture of Gina Lollobrigida in Pageant magazine and often imagines a log cabin on a dude ranch where she stands in the door in a black net appliquéd with stars, invites him inside, and says, “Thelonious, you are such a wone-dare-fool reader. Would you like to see my breasts?”

That the patriotism of fourth-grade boys is every feather as absurd and elegant as the mating displays of peacocks.

Thus, all had agreed, if reluctantly, to read the book, and now the idea of dangerous secrets is in th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• The Portal of the Years
• BOOK ONE
• Requiem for Reba Portis
• The Secret Order of the Eagle
• Reversals of Fortune
• Wayward Swains in a Time of War
• The Righteous Trip
• BOOK TWO
• Puberty in Cold Springs
• Did You See Any of the Others While You Were There
• Only the Animals Are Real
• Buenas Noches
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH