What does the Mississippi Delta sound like in verse?

The Mississippi Delta, fraught with complications from a tortured history yet drenched in natural beauty, is the focus of a new collection of poems by Philip C. Kolin, a Chicago native and professor emeritus at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he spent his entire academic career. Each poem in this collection reveals that the dust of clay so pervasive in the southern landscape and the river that runs through it have imprinted Kolin’s senses with images of the place that are almost palpable.

“Infinity pauses here,” Kolin writes of the Delta. “Men in pinstripe waistcoats and men / with steel ankles still trying to settle the past / which keeps leaking, appearing too / present to ever be closed” shows that the past is not an illusion. It lives in the present, not only as a reminder but as a substantial force. And the river holds secrets—confessions, suicides, lynchings. It is “the longest tear duct in America.”

Poetry at its best connects with something larger than the self. And Kolin’s poetry, anchored in history, the natural world, and his Catholic faith, challenges the narcissistic murmurings of many of this century’s poets. His poetry is both particular and expansive because he knows that in the individual image lies the universal truth. He zeroes in on characters, personalities, natural phenomena, and what one would expect from a collection of poems about the Delta: racial conflict.