Review: Tornado Drill by Dave Malone

Review: Tornado Drill by Dave Malone Reviewed by Barry Harris

Title: Tornado Drill Author: Dave Malone

Year: 2022

Publisher: Kelsay Books

From my first read of the title poem, Dave Malone’s poetry reveals itself in its crafted word choice and artful metaphor. Before the tornado, the school children in “Tornado Drill” are not simply hiding beneath their desks. Their “…legs angle / and lean like autumn crickets.” Time slows within the poem illustrated by dust motes which float, not just around their shoes, but “above the tongues of our sneakers.” When the storm hits, “… the sky paints / the classroom windows cocoa.” Not muddy brown, but cocoa. While I have, over time, read and published three of the poems in this volume, this was my first time reading a collection of Malone’s work in one sitting. By the time I reached the end of the opening title poem, I was enchanted by his deft use of metaphor when his final couplet is a refer back to the opening image of the angular legs of schoolchildren cramped under their desks “like autumn crickets: ”

Some of us srape wings together and squeak Others weep. I scramble to the glass.

A reader discovers in Malone’s poetry his ability to meld two stories into one, or perhaps reveal that they are both one. In “Leaf Blower,” the poet’s morning neditation is interrupted by a leaf-blowing neighbor. Like mathematics, … She’s precise

the way she slides from side to side, the way she forms right angles as if acing high school math.

The leaf-blowing neighbor’s noise increasingly sounds “louder than semitrucks howling from the bypass” and we witness how

… She blows

into blowing into blowing until a vortex of leaves

half-eaten by mower and storm form in the narrows

By this time we have forgotten the interruption of the poet’s morning meditation until the last lines:

Here is a full sound. Here is The aum I must have been waiting for.

Many of Dave Malone’s poems exhibit a mix of empathy and curiosity, as if answering the question what is underneath all this? In “The 9:15 to Memphis,” he paints a picture of a neighbor gardener, introduced to us interestingly as the “gray man on the corner.” We are told that he “gardened most of the year round.” He twice dug up potatoes in “December ice” with “his big hands” and liked bruised tomatoes. Then we are told that “he grew a pair of teenage girls for a while.” Girls whose

Hips hypnotized water sprinklers in the summer

after they batted wiffle balls into the street. Their home runs were the few times

they left his lot. Once, I saw the girls at the hardware store with a wad of bills

buying tomato cages, their eyes fixed on the bus schedule above the clerk.

Like many poets these days, Malone crafted several pandemic-era poems into his collection. His poem “Chance It” exemplifies this episode in our shared history expertly.

When my quarantine is over, I want to bet at the horse races.

I want to be that guy at the track, down on his luck, glad of the rain

… with so much happening in the rain, with the trotting horses and the cooing jockeys,

with distant clouds crumbling pale and thin like wafers, like my heart for a girl I knew in school, like communion.

I once attended a lecture on how to compile a poetry book manuscript. The lecturer’s point, whether true or not, was memorable to me. He described a book of poetry like a train. At the front of the train is the locomotive. Here is the heavy duty engine. Here is where you place your most powerful poem — one that can pull the rest. At the end of the book is the caboose. (The lecturer was old enough to remember cabooses). This is where the conductor rides, waving farewell to you as the train slides away. This is where you place the poem that winks at you as it leaves, like both of you might know a little secret. The opening poem in Tornado Drill is the title poem discussed earlier. Here, is the complete text of “Heron” from the final page 96.

I startled the great blue heron when my kayak scratched stones in the river’s low summer water. With little effort, like the way one takes off shoes, the grand bird flapped long arms, held steady, until she found the shore opposite me and slipped into the sycamores below the bluff. She stayed there a long time, longer than my life.

Dave Malone grew up in both Missouri and Kansas. He attended Ottawa University and later received a master’s degree in English from Indiana State University where he studied poetry under Matthew Brennan. His most recent book is You Know the Ones (Golden Antelope Press, 2017). Works have appeared in Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozark Studies, San Pedro River Review, and Plainsongs.

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and four anthologies by Brick Street Poetry. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Married and father of two grown sons, Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, RedHeaded Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence.

He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.

Editor

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and four anthologies by Brick Street Poetry: Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry; Words and Other Wild Things and Cowboys & Cocktails:Poems from the True Grit Saloon, and Reflections on Little Eagle Creek. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Married and father of two grown sons, Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, Red-Headed Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence. One of his poems was on display at the National Museum of Sport and another is painted on a barn in Boone County, Indiana as part of Brick Street Poetry‘s Word Hunger public art project. His poems are also included in these anthologies: From the Edge of the Prairie; Motif 3: All the Livelong Day; and Twin Muses: Art and Poetry.

He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.