Winter Road
Jenkins' poems are gentler than Casey's but, because of verbal and formal choices, just as idiomatic. Hailing from Duluth, Jenkins uses the generally simple diction and syntax that Garrison Keillor and the Coen brothers have popularized as normal for the region they share with him. Jenkins has read on Keillor's radio show, and his poems, like Keillor's monologues, teeter between wisdom and foolishness and between the mundane and the surreal. If banal subject matter holds Keillor's comedy down to earth, Jenkins' utterly prosaic manner keeps him from drowning in surrealism, the besetting danger of prose poetry. His prose poems on such things as "A Hill of Beans" and "Wind in the Trees" are most like Jim Heynen's lovely short-short stories about Iowa farm boys (seeThe One-Room Schoolhouse, 1993). The prose makes his work as distinctive of a particular group as soldier talk makes Casey's. Like Casey, he can be very funny, though not as frightening. But Keillor is never as frightening as James Jones.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved