What Passes For Love (Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Series)
by Jack Bedell
Category: Poetry

Few things will bring people together in south Louisiana quicker than stories, food, and festivals that have both. The poems in Jack Bedell's What Passes for Love show all that and a little lagniappe. From a midnight chari vari, to the Fete de la Roulaison (the Grinding Festival), to newlyweds making love in the cane field and fishing tales galore, Bedell writes about the many sides of Louisiana's Acadian culture and its people. Poem by poem, this collection builds an honest, evocative, and sensitive world of stories told by a writer with an obvious love of place. Love in the Cane Field-After the Grinding The young groom wakes to stars and October chill to find a trail of bedclothes disappearing into the children's cane. There's nothing left of the festival, save the smoke that lingers- above the burned fields. The cane's been pressed, the trucks readied for the trip to town. Here and there nighthawks skim the clearing for mice. There's no other movement above the rows as he gathers wood for the. fire. He tries to think of the evening they've just passed alone, the lines of her back beneath the moon, the hope of money this year's cane will bring, but cannot keep his mind from what waits for her between the stalks-snakes left from summer, sinkholes yawning for her legs, blades left carelessly about. He does not blink until the cane parts, releasing her to the clearing naked and smiling, stronger than he knew. In the fire's glow he sees a spider web stretched across her stomach, hip to hip, the shine of her skin against the night, her eyes closing slowly with each step toward him. Next year's growth surrounds them in the dark, and morning holds its breath across the fields.