The Bridges of Sumter County

摘要

Continuing the current post-presidential apotheosis of Jimmy Carter, the peacemaker from Plains now steps forward as the poet from Plains with Always a Reckoning and Other Poems (130 pages. Times. $18). This move is more audacious than trying to pacify Bosnian tough guy Radovan Karadzic; in this country, "poet" is almost as laughable a word as "liberal." Carter's rhyme time started in 1980 when he met Arkansas poet Miller Williams, who became his unofficial Secretary for Poetic Policy. As a pol-poet, Carter is a much more modest and unsophisticated versifier than former senator Eugene McCarthy. McCarthy's lodestar was Yeats; Carter's model is obviously Robert Frost, whose deceptive simplicity has led legions of hayseed troubadours into the halls of Hallmark. Carter uses Frostian cadences with some adroitness, although it's hard to tell sometimes if he's using off-rhymes or just blows the rhyme: "silence/brilliance," the figure of Rachel Clark, a black woman who could pick more cotton and peanuts than anyone and who would take the young Jimmy on six-mile walks to fish and talk. "It wasn't empty preaching, like in church," writes Carter. "Those might have been the best days I have known."