They All Rest in the Boneyard Now and Other Poems by Raymond L. Atkins

They All Rest in the Boneyard Now and Other Poems by Raymond L. Atkins

“I enjoyed reading They All Rest in the Boneyard Now, among other reasons, because I got to spend time with Raymond Atkins’ delightful poetic imagination and his ability to assume voices. In poetry, voice or the little poem-plays present the problem of how to make poetry sound colloquial or as if what’s said sounds natural coming from that character. In this case, the narrator’s voice has the calm, poignant tone of someone contemplating the most somber subject. Eternity here is doom, an unbearable prison sentence, but the overriding tristesse reminds me of Emily’s speech near the end of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town in which she regrets not looking life in the face when she was alive, unlike in “Infant Archer” here with “his only regret…he would miss your morning smile.”

Atkins also shows great mastery of the language devices— interesting diction and vivid figures of speech, like the symbolism of “the empty tract right next to you” in the cemetery, a succinct image for the transience of things, as well as the irony in “everlasting nap,” Ellen “live” in the mist, the paradox of “memory / of nothing at all,” “a small slice of eternity” in the poem “Dr. Battey,” and “Necropolis” with its “together, always alone.” Metaphors and similes strike gold sparks in the gloomy elegiac twilight, like the emotionally powerful “dicey rock-strewn trails of eternity,” “weathered / like a plank of barnwood” in the poem “Committee,” the eerie mood of “wolf of the steppes…at night” in “Hesse,” the isolation and sadness of the soldier “who missed the last boat home,” in “Mary Knox” the metaphor of the “stem snapped / and you withered” accompanied by the simple, strange carving on the stone, and many others like “sighed past / like an evening breeze.” The imagery is heartfelt like “a scratch between the ears” in “Prunes,” reminding me of how much my dog enjoys a good back rub. I can easily relate to the poem with Brownie with his “back leg chugging…like a runaway locomotive.”

What I call Atkins’ “list poems” work well, too: the pastiche of lyrics in “Elvis,” the poem “Parts about Parenthood” with its touching “just to check for breath and pulse,” the Dante poem, the poems “What We Found” and “Snippets.” “Closing Out” reminded me of an in-house funeral I attended very young, after which an uncle’s kids were parceled out to various relatives.

Thanks, Raymond, for allowing me to spend some warm, earnest time with you.” - Ken Anderson, author of The Intense Lover and Sea Change: An Example of the Pleasure Principle

From the author:

This collection is a departure for me. Those of you familiar with my work know that I am primarily a novelist and sometime essayist, but the truth is that I have always been a secret poet. My mentor at an early stage of my literary development was one of my English professors. He was a poet as well as an educator, thus it was not surprising that he encouraged me to follow the path of verse. My first sojourn into creative writing came during my undergraduate years in the late seventies and early eighties, and the initial medium I chose was poetry, although I later gave the genre up in favor of the novel. I found, as Robert Penn Warren once did, that “poems eat novels.”

You will note that many of the pieces in this volume are inspired by tombstones. I have long had the habit of visiting cemeteries, especially old ones, looking for inspiration and for great character names, and sometimes just for the sense of calm that such places evoke. Over time I have amassed quite a collection of tombstone pictures, and some of the more interesting of these have resulted in poems and in drawings by the excellent Evelyn Mayton. Some are about famous people, and some are about animals, and some are about unknown departed, and some are about just regular folks.

I hope you enjoy this collection as much as Evelyn and I enjoyed bringing it to you.