tilt: a book review

Greetings, Poetry People! One of the nice things about being in this community is getting an inside look at our friends' projects. For a long time I've known that Jone Rush MacCulloch was working on something big, but I had no idea how deep and personal was the history of Jone's first novel in verse, TILT. Now, though, I've had a chance to enjoy the full experience of her creative endeavor, and I'm here to tell you it is VERY worth your time!

Click the cover to go to Amazon

This beautiful, glowing cover, designed by a parent in Jone's school community, offers the right amount of information. We know that it's a story about a relationship, that the characters are big kids (but not nearly-grown teens); that it's a neighborhood story, not a wilderness one; that trees and birds--are those crows?--will be important; and that all is not sunny in TILTville. Seeing the characters in silhouette, their backs to us, suggests that they are opaque in some way, unavailable in some way. Perhaps it's easy to divine all this in hindsight, but I give kudos to the illustrator and to the clarity of the writing she worked from!

I have to admit that my relationship with verse novels has been strugglesome. My instinct has been to demand that a poem in a story should still be observably, experientially a poem, and for me that requires figurative language. It can't just be musical prose chopped into shorter lines (and it definitely can't be straight-up narrative chopped into shorter lines). On top of the figurative language requirement, I somehow got the idea that each poem in a verse novel should stand on its own, appreciable as a poem even outside of its narrative arc. Happily, I've come to understand that a verse novel is a different beast, and that the metaphorical, figurative ideas can stretch across the arc of the entire work rather than being trapped in single, free-standing poems.

Jone accomplishes this artfully in TILT. By interweaving a few different concrete images or "markers" (I don't want to say symbols, because they don't necessarily stand in for something else), the basic story, which could be reduced to a tragic, rather sensational evening newsbite, becomes a story of considerable texture and emotion.

First, there's the pinball image that lends the novel its title, and serves as the anchor for main character Darrah's relationship with her dad, which, like a ball drained by too much shaking, nudging and shoving, has changed forever. Next we have the special oak tree, Garry, who has free-standing poems of his own and is the site of Darrah's important friend relationship with Lily, which also breaks and tilts at the start of the story. The crows come in as a counting rhyme and connect Darrah to her mother, grandmother, and supersitious ideas of fate, which are, just as stereotypes are based on real observations, based on real things that happen to people.

And then there's Jackson, no image, but a living, breathing daredevil mystery-boy who arrives to replace Lily just as 4th grade ends and a long sad summer looms. Jackson is my favorite character, and although Jone establishes by the 25th poem all the necessary bases for everything to come, I finished the novel loving the kid I'd come to know, yet still wondering about who Jackson was, exactly (maybe that's because we didn't get many glimpses of his family, and maybe that was intentional).

This story is full of hurt and fear and stubbornness and misunderstandings of the kind 10-12-year-olds specialize in, along with joy and courage and connection, especially in nature. It's based on events that happened to a real 2nd grader in Jone's school community who died after being mauled by dogs. Jone was wise to move the story up to 5th grade--though of course younger kids also need to read and be comforted and guided by stories in which bad things happen--but to place the story in the voice of Darrah with Jackson and Lily alongside, (after a rocky rapprochement of the two original friends), allows for a convincing and important first-person exploration of personal and community loss. You can tell Jone did a good job with that, because the family of the real Jackson attended her book launch and approved.

Finally, I appreciate the pacing of this novel in verse. It gets going fast, but like the cover, does not reveal too much too soon. It gives a lot of space to the secret Darrah keeps, and although the world is full of pain that comes in various forms and intensities, the adults in the story come through for the kids in the end, and we get to see this happen on a timeline that does not feel tidy and pat, but more like…real life.

And now I’m going to give a very big compliment that I didn’t see coming as I planned this review. Jone’s book, I realize, reminds me broadly of one of my (and possibly your) favorite books of all time: HARRIET THE SPY. Portland 10-year-olds texting on their pink Razr phones seems very far from scribbling in a notebook in 1961 Manhattan, but the complex feelings about relationships and loss are exactly the same 65 years on. I’m comforted to think that we’re not evolving as fast as it sometimes seems.

I'll leave you with one of Garry the Oak's poems:

Trying Out Things

sun
shines
ko-aw--
caa--caa--caa--
fledglings try out wings
someone climbs, hangs from my branches

Jone wrote an amazing post back at the beginning of May when TILT launched. I encourage you to go and read the letter she wrote to her characters. It's so informative about how the book came about, the time and effort that went into making it a creative work of fiction, and how personal our projects are. It's a miracle any of us can make such personal experiences into something others will relate to--or is the miracle that we will, over and over?

Thanks to Buffy Silverman for hosting us today from soggy Michigan!