As I mentioned when I bought this book in April 2023, I might be the biggest collector of Leah Lathrom Wallace in the country since I have now read both The Best of Wheat and a Little Chaff and this second volume.
So I picked this up for my upstairs poetry book. I’ve taken to reading a little poetry right before bed every night as part of my wind-down ritual. For some months, I made my way through the stack of Poetry magazines that I bought last October.
And, you know what? I prefer the grandmother poetry in this volume. It’s got rhythm, and it’s got rhyme. Its contents are about trusting in God and home considerations–including some poems for friends and family members and personal history. Actually, this volume has a number of poems by family members, which reinforces the fact that everyone with the better education system of the early 20th century wrote poems (see my own father’s poem here).
So it was a quick read, relatable (more so than modern message poetry which is about speaking the poet’s truth and not shared humanity, so the reader might be excluded from the truth at all), and it helped me wind down.
Given that the back part of the book is relative’s poetry to fill this chapbook out, I have to assume that I now own the whole set. I’ll find other works like it, though; the poetry tables at the book sales are still full of these little chapbooks by somebody’s grandma. And I’ll pick them up and get to them eventually. And, eventually, they will disappear from the poetry tables, replaced by Print on Demand works by contemporary poets. If anything at all. Ai, I am leading to a dark and depressing meta-conclusion even though this particular book was anything but.
