Reviewed by Peter Mladinic
Redemption Songs, a review of The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News
by Roy Bentley
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions
May 2025, 106 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1962405195
Ohio comes up often in the poems of James Wright, and also in the work of Roy Bentley. Both poets share themes particular to Ohio and its region, and both are similar in tone and sentiments. Aside from their generational divide, there are marked differences. For one, Wright, the poet who put Martins Ferry on the map of American literature, often wanders from Ohio, while Bentley stays closer to home in his previous books and in his latest, The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News.
One way into an appreciation of Bentley’s new poems is through music: blues, rock n roll, and redemption songs. Poems that reference the genre of music known as the blues are poems of lineage and lament. Their historical basis is national, international, and personal. The book’s title poem, “The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News” has no music references, but it is very much the Blues spoken, considering the sense of the poem: the wreck of Your life. In “We Were Drinking Kentucky Bourbon,” the lines “Mick Jagger made it crystal clear: I shouted out Who killed the Kennedys? / when, after all it / was you and me” (81) refer back to the title poem and, obliquely, to Martin Luther King’s “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.” Bentley’s blues are not so much of guilt but more of awareness. In the title poem a person is watching the news of a car wreck; it’s just as much that person’s wreck as it is the wreck of strangers. The same with the Kennedys. Literally Oswald and Sirhan did the killing, but it’s also “on us,” you and me. Awareness. In “South Chanute Street (1974)” two men “do drugs” in a trailer. One is Black, and “there are at least two Americas” is followed by “I’ll let you put yourself in his place” (17). Then a music reference. “Maybe put on Traffic and check yourself” (17). The Jefferson Airplane album Surrealistic Pillow is the backdrop for a poem about race relations. The speaker says, of his Black friend Butch Thompson:
We were friends, and he liked that I’d get high and
clean. Dust, sweep. Disappear a day’s dirty dishes.
But my mother ordered me not to bring him home
to Ohio. Which schooled us both. He was saying
I could know him. Be his friend then. However,
being a Black-American in nineteen seventy-three
would be the one record he wouldn’t turn me on to.
That bit of housekeeping I’d accomplish on my own (33).
Bentley’s Blues-oriented poems are indeed aware that “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.” In a poem that references singers Ella Fitzgerald, Janis Joplin, and the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit,” about a lynching in the South, he says “As any Black woman in America, the vocalist knows more / than she is at liberty to say” (38). The poem concludes with the line “that portion of our unhappy history finds us out, regardless” (38). Bentley’s blues are of lineage and lament. “To quote an old Elmore James song: The sky is crying” (40). “Autumn Leaves” references jazz musicians Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt; it concludes with the apostrophe “oh God of Mercy, God of Doom” (42), while “The Week the Whole World Got the Blues” begins “That was the week Russia invaded Ukraine” (53).
Bentley’s rock n roll poems seek, and find beauty in transience They are underscored by the idea that things are all the more precious because they only happen once: we only happen once. “Kissing,” about adolescence, references directly the Jimi Hendrix song “Hey Joe,” and, indirectly, the Hendrix album Are You Experienced. The poem, about a kiss, concludes with the lines “asking to be remembered after death or long enough / to cancel all that isn’t worth remembering in any case” (16). In “The Satisfaction Theory of Atonement” what is given is less than what was promised. The setting is in a tent, where “this carnival stripper didn’t strip…to some songs from a tape deck” (20). The speaker, who was 12 at the time, remembers “learning lust and guilt, if not sin and atonement, in that order” (20). The speaker, in hindsight, evokes perplexity, and in the poem “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” he evokes the perplexity of friendship. Both the title and the Suzanne in this reference Leonhard Cohen songs.
In the poem that follows “Hey,…” the speak remembers a chance encounter with his first love, after their not seeing each other for some time. “She crooned my name, ….As honey-sweet / as hearing there’s sex after death and you’ll be having / some” (27). A wry humor threads through all of these four aforementioned poems. “Pain” is a childhood memory of going to the dentist. “Beatles music is playing in the passing cars” (32). Wryly the speaker comments “My suffering ends for the day. I leave the office / and its medicinal stench” (32). “Why the Last Snow on Earth May Be Red,” a memory of giving a poetry reading at a university, references Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promised Land.” The speaker says, “At the end of a day I wanted to die, and he reminded me not to despair” (34). Other poems—such as “Leaf-fall in October in Ohio,” its observation of “rock ‘n roll and rap songs dispersed / from passing automobiles” (39), and “Hard Night in Fleming-Neon,” with its songs that “praised Jesus” (49), and “Dead Flowers,” “the music …suddenly ever-present— / Jagger’s ballsy vocals, Keith Richards’ guitar” (52)—testify to and celebrate transience. However, the most poignant treatment of transience is spoken, not sung, and found in “More the Smoky Voice of Longing and Loss,” a poem about familiarity. In the “Shell-station office is / the Genuine Auto Parts calendar for 1962 and a price / chart …The price chart has a grease-pen on a string for changes; / the pen sways with gusts in the winter or if it’s storming” (87). “Changes” has the resonance of a noun and a verb.
Pops has a postman-friend (Buster) who will stop by
after he finishes his route. And if it’s autumn, Buster
is sucking down a 7Up and bullshitting about women.
My father’s name, spelled out on the station window,
says what it says in red-white-and-blue script lettering.
Soon it will be closing time at Roy’s Shell (87).
In Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” the lyric “song of freedom” is heard three times. Roy Bentley poems that could be called redemptions are poems of freedom, that have in common an awareness of the history of inequity, injustice, slavery, poverty, exploitation, delusion, and war. They are calls for freedom. Unlike the blues and rock n roll, the music of redemption is not a genre, but it is the most pervasive music in these poems. “If the existence of God is more than a grift” (18) is the first line of a poem about the ship The Titanic, that sunk on her maiden voyage. Coincidentally, or ironically, the song “Luck Be a Lady” (19) is referenced in the poem that follows, “On the Grand Staircase …” In the middle of future-oriented (space exploration) “Rocket Man” appears the phrase “the promise of freedom” (23). “Vroom,” a title with an onomatopoeia, is about the poet’s late cousin Bob, who “liked / Rush Limbaugh …believed in Jesus Christ as his personal savior and told me / he loved me” (31). “Plant / your love and let it grow” (57) appears in “Apocalypse Note Found on a Whirlpool Refrigerator Door in Pataskala, Ohio.” Bentley’s redemption poems are not only poems of freedom but also love poems. The last line of Philip Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” is “What will survive of us is love.” Bentley’s poems of redemption wear that sentiment. The strongest bond of love is between the poet and his maternal grandmother: Mazy Frances Collier Potter. He says, “I’d tell you / if she waved to me, …However, / she hasn’t. And her confidence about God and an afterlife / isn’t mine” (97). Then there’s this, from “Blood to the Bridles of the Horses:”
…She was such a true believer.
Being hillborn, a survivor of the coal wars, she knew
the rulebooks of the road say what we agree they say.
Better that a child’s screams go out across all the years
of the rest of his life and the lives of his children than he
be caught off guard. That must have been her rationale (93).
Is Roy Bentley a political poet? He’s a very political poet, who might well ascribe to the notion that there’s no party line to the imagination. He is political in the same sense as was his Ohio predecessor James Wright. He is regional, national, and global. He is a poet of then, with a keen awareness of “at least two Americas” (17), and a poet of now, with global concerns.
When he says “Movies are what we have in the United States of America / to save of from some poverty of Spirit,” (99) he speaks for humankind. That he does so in words that are passionate, elegant, and honest is his readers’ good fortune. Roy Bentley is one of the best poets writing in English, and The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News is his best book to date.
About the reviewer: Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.