C. D. Albin
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C. D. Albin
C. D. Albin was born and reared in West Plains, Missouri. He is the author of the story collection Hard Toward Home, for which he received the 2017 Missouri Author Award in Fiction. He holds a Doctor of Arts in English from the University of Mississippi and has taught for many years at Missouri State University – West Plains. His stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in a number of periodicals, including Arkansas Review, Cape Rock, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Natural Bridge, and Slant. Axe, Fire, Mule came out in Spring 2018.
Here is a sample:
Mine
The morning after there were
thick oaks and walnuts, barreled
lengths filling the field, and when
I walked among them I thought
of mares and colts bolting in
the wind-swirled night, fragile legs
snapping, bones jagged as the
broken ends of storm-lashed limbs.
But we were blessed, nine horses
out of nine, all huddled like
cattle in the far corner
of the pasture. They are fine,
Julie said, frightened but fine.
I thought so too until I
read their eyes, and through theirs, mine.
Here's a portion of a review by poet and novelist Joe Benevento, published in
Green Hills Literary Lantern.
C.D. Albin, was born and raised in the Ozarks and has taught for years in his hometown within the English Department of Missouri State University, West Plains. His book of poems, Axe, Fire, Mule, is broken into five parts, all of them dealing with what his publisher explains are the “joys and disappointments, loyalties and doubts, and inevitable changes we associate with ‘Ozark noir.’” The book is divided into five parts: Ozark Dark; Marooned; Axe, Fire, Mule; Rose of Sharon and Will and Testament. The first three sections all deal with familiar Ozark themes, including poems about rural poverty, the rugged landscape and the resilient men and women who farm and work that land, even as their parents, grandparents and great grandparents did. Rose of Sharon focuses on Albin’s role as an educator, while the final section’s Will and Testament poems, all from the perspective of “Cicero Jack,” let an elder Ozark resident lament the new ways of both his own people and the strangers who come to the Ozarks for outdoor entertainment. Albin as a Ph.D., scholar and poet who has lived most of his life in the Ozarks is uniquely qualified to speak with eloquence and authority of Ozark realities. His tone is consistently sympathetic towards Ozark people and remains so even when he narrates their foibles, as when they keep killing coyotes illegally “No matter the new conservation/ officer’s patient pleas” (“All Else”) or when they ignore the “Burn Ban” because the old man featured in the poem has always done “slash and burn” farming. Still, while Albin appreciates the stubbornness and traditions of the Ozarks (one of which is to be suspicious of strangers) he does not go so far as to share some of his students or neighbors’ racism against Spanish speaking immigrants (“Speech Lessons”), and instead shows sympathy for all of his struggling students, whether immigrants, returning veterans or a working class man who hopes against hope that his education will perhaps rescue him from a life of labor: “How can somebody like me find work that’s clean?” (“Revision”).
Of course, having sympathy both with Spanish speaking immigrants and with the people he has claimed as his own all his life is not an easy line for Albin to walk. In the book’s last section, Will and Testament, all the poems are in the voice of “Cicero Jack” an old Ozark man who laments and vilifies the intrusion of St. Louis and Springfield tourists, while also judging his nephew in Tulsa for living in a sub-division where there’s “no place to run” and his other heirs who can’t wait for him to die so as to convert his farm to “bass boats and bank accounts.” In one of the most poignant poems in the Rose of Sharon section, “Speech Lessons,” Albin admits to remaining quiet in the barbershop while some of his neighbors speak unkindly about the Spanish speakers new to the Ozarks. Of course, as a stranger to Ozark ways myself, I’m left to ask where Cicero Jack gets his hair cut and what he has to say while he is there. I’m left wondering if some of the seemingly admirable qualities of Ozark men who keep killing coyotes illegally or starting fires during a drought are the same qualities that make them unlikely to like anything strange or new, including anyone not born to their part of the world or their settled way of life.