Review of Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig by Jane Gentry

A white pig! Mother, wife, lover, college professor, poet laureate of Kentucky. A pig rooting in the dirt?

The analogy works. Like the white pig shining golden in the slant of a November afternoon, Jane Gentry digs subjects and images from her Kentucky heritage for the poems in her collection Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig . She has spent her life in the same place she was born, and she grew up surrounded by relatives, including the deceased in family graveyards, and her own children. In the title poem, she asks:

what other brutes could translate this bright dirt? This heavy light? These showers of gold?

She writes with passion about the sound of a furnace, the touch of a lover, or the house that is her “body’s body.” All her senses are turned on and tuned in to nature and her surroundings. Her poems describe tenderly, lovingly, in the minutest detail the joys and tragedies, successes and griefs of life as they evoke strong feelings in the reader. Sappho, Homer, William Carlos Williams, Jane Kenyon, and Walt Whitman influence her work, because, she says, “they share in the creation of a sense of life. The immediacy of sensory experience. An inclusiveness of beauty, ugliness, death.”

The images constantly surprise and delight: A train seen from a bedroom window “stitches in and out of sight.” The cat lusts after “a foolishness of sparrows.” “Doves hoo their cries of love, robins’ declarations fill the air. . . . the haunchy calves tumble through the gate, / then the wandery newborns.”

Gentry’s writing is musical, whether in a perfect sonnet, a long narrative, a quatrain, or a form of her own making. Read the poems aloud and enjoy the rhythm and sounds. Their comfortable phrasing makes for smooth reading and easy comprehension. Often, the subject itself is music. In “Waking Up, in May” Gentry writes, “The knowing grackle / trills . . . among expectant leaves.” Then, The quick baton of lightning!

In downspouts and gutters, rapturous phrasings, downpouring streams.

The event of day’s waking inspires several of Gentry’s poems. “Aubade” realizes that morning still comes, even at times of grief. In “The News” the speaker enjoys the smallest details of another glorious morning:

the slap of my neighbor’s screen door as she turns her face to the sky, then bends to pick up the news of this day.

She makes tender portraits of relatives—parents, aunts, grandparents. The pear tree her father planted years before his death becomes the vehicle for Gentry’s description of him. She draws a sharp picture of her mother by giving us fragments of the diary her mother kept during Gentry’s schoolgirl summer in France.

Gentry understands the importance of the dwelling place. Even the sound of the furnace coming on becomes a musical symbol for life’s contentment. Her earlier book, A Garden in Kentucky , contains a long narrative poem about the fire destroying the house her family had lived in since a great-grandfather built it. In Portrait , “A Human House” describes the primal pleasure in being in one’s own house, making an ode to its quotidian sights and chores:

All day to inhabit! Like a fox in her den, a bird in a knothole, an ant in its tunnel, I belong here. . . And then, after night falls, to stand in the dark backyard looking into the golden light of the rooms you inhabit in the house that is your body’s body, and to see on the kitchen table the voluptuous wine in the dark mysterious bottle which you at supper all but emptied.

Descriptions of lovemaking are beautifully allusive, as in “By Your Small Lake”:

At dusk I sit in the leftover sunshine Your dock absorbed this July day. . . . an invisible frog grumps once and, through the blackening surface, drops like the pancakes your deft hands turned this morning as you made breakfast— hands which wavered all night over the lake of my body, its dark mirroring our hungers rising cunning as the turtles, shining as the fish, to feed.

And in “Penelope’s Night Out,” the narrator went with her lover to a party where she “chatted up a temptress in whose thrall / you once were held.”

“Nearby” is a length of Liberty lawn, that fine flowery cotton used for summer dresses:

I doze on a bench in a garden. Like a cat, I absorb June sunshine. A bird dips so close I hear its bony whir. My eyes open a slit. A butterfly sips at a bloom that bobs under the tissue of its wings. In the flowery light my open book warms on my chest. A cardinal pours out the syrup of its song. The pinks throb in the still-cool air. A bee forces the nod from a head of clover. I sit up then, and see nearby on the meadow grass a hawk’s shadow sailing in circles.

We don’t know what the shadow forebodes. Its dramatic contrast to the sensuous delights of the summer afternoon reminds us that this Eden lies in the real world.

Gentry writes about death in all its stages:

I arise from the grave of the bed.

the blood drumming in the veins like a river running toward the night when we cease being: practicing, practicing.

The narrator sighs as she sits beside her dying aunt: “no point to being here except being / here with you still being.” “The Reading Lamp” wraps pathos and nostalgia for lost relatives around a gooseneck lamp:

On Grandfather’s eighty-eighth birthday his children gave him a reading lamp, which he trained on the newspaper morning and evening. Sleek, silver, modern, taller than I was, it rose from the floor on its leaden base. Its bulb burned in the chromium shell at the end of the gooseneck, which my cousin and I bent into snake shapes, scaring each other. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grandfather died the next year. Aunt Grace died early of a stroke. Aunt Mabel and Uncle Teddy, of lung cancer. My father, my mother, both gone. My cousin, too—a suicide.

I alone have lived to tell this little story, and now I approach the dark to which they’ve gone.

Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig is a joy to read. The poems vary in form and subject, but they are always perfect, always delightful, never maudlin. Gentry conveys her emotions well, and in doing so, arouses our own. We learn much about Jane Gentry, both poet and poet’s persona, the loves and sorrows of that life, while she hones our perceptions of the world.