Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods
Paula Bohince
Sarabande Books, 2008

Paula Bohince’s Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods tells of familial loss in mottled hues—in gothic landscape, near-forgotten memory, and revisioned biblical stories—eliding the prosaic with collages of lonely voices that compose the generations who have inhabited the farming and mining communities of her native Pennsylvania. Together, these poems narrated by a farmer’s daughter craft a unified body from remembered story and natural landscape, assembling the mystery of a murdered father through gospels spoken by each of three “apostles,” Lucas, Paul, and John, who served as hired workers on the family farm. In the absence of conclusive answers to the mystery of her father’s death, the mourning lines from the daughter become acrostic poems. The first letters of “Acrostic for My Father,” “I dream of you,” give a present voice to the narrator and the generations who endured in this particular landscape.

Many of the voices in the poems of Bohince’s collection conjure a remembered rural landscape. While the first voice to speak in Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods invokes a biblical language and narrative that will repeat through the book, it relies on landscape for its content. In “Prayer,” Bohince’s narrator says: “Adore, me, Lord / beneath this raw milk sky, your vision / of silvery cream comprising daylight.”

Here, a powerful presence of landscape inhabits the voice, but that landscape is far less clear than the voice invoking Lord. In the following poem, “Landscape with Sheep and Deer,” Bohince’s narrative voice offers presence to animals that populate the family farm, “The cloud-like sheep, and the earth-toned deer / that belonged to the sky.” The cloud and the sheep, the earth and the deer, blend together into the whole of this place.

Not only is physical space blended in Bohince’s poetry, but the generations of these Pennsylvania woods blend their voices, expanding the scope of Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods from present to past. In “Acrostic: Outhouse” the narrator of the poems speaks of the generations who peopled her homestead before: “uncles and great-uncles, delicate and stooping aunts / tatting lace all day, needles replacing / husbands who disappeared into Bayonet Woods, never returning . . .”

In the following poem, “Spirits at the Edge of Bayonet Woods,” the voice of the narrator gives way to the voices of the past, as they ask,

Tell me, what was a woman’s purpose in those woods?
Trading quails’ eggs for the babies’ medicine,
boiling ash and animal grease to shampoo coal dust
from our men’s curling hair?

Later in the poem, those joined voices speak with pity and understanding for “the valley’s only suicide,” a woman named Grace: “Forgive her, Lord, for leaving this earth so early. / She was terribly lonely.” These voices of the past, like the narrator of the present in “Prayer,” ask the Lord for understanding, for presence among them.

Bohince’s poems, creating a brutal world of natural and human elements, ache for an intervening presence and knowledge as they ache for revelations to their mysteries. These poems present the Pennsylvania landscape through distorted mindsets most often associated with the landscapes of the American South, landscapes peopled with misfits such as the one from Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Indeed, in “The Gospel According to Lucas,” one of the murder suspects, while fishing on the farm of his employer, speaks to his mind’s struggle against moral clarity:

Our lines cast out softly

from the furred edge of sedge, algae,

my intent to be a good man

filled with mercy

erasing as evening overwhelms,

as the argument within myself increases in sense and volume.

Here, Lucas, like O’Connor’s Misfit, negotiates his identity through the transformations of the landscape he inhabits. And Bohince, like O’Connor, provides only slight traces to the character of her misfits. O’Connor’s Misfit, in his ill-defined self, says, “Ain’t a cloud in the sky. . . . Don’t see no sun but don’t see no cloud neither.” In Bohince’s “The Gospel According to Paul,” a second suspect says “All of my life I have plotted, a snake in the grass, / Which I see now as innocent.”

The appeal of Bohince’s poems is in their ability to dwell in a landscape where “everything [is] off balance.” In a world declining into itself, Bohince and her narrative voices find God-like pleasures within their place. Avoiding distorted certainties, Bohince dwells in a newly seen gothic landscape of rural Pennsylvania and offers her readers the pleasures of God. In “The Gospel According to John,” she writes:

The pleasures of His birds swollen with feathers,
His birds bound to His sky,

belonging to his kingdom of violence.

These pleasures of the land. . . .