intro

Introduction

Giving It Away, David Memmott's fifth book of poems, offers readers anywhere mature, sophisticated, visionary work. “Where the Yellow Brick Road Turns West” centers that collection and stands alone among the other sixty-three poems gathered in this latest book. Usually a poet of shorter lyrics, Memmott divided this cyclic narrative into sixteen movements over twenty pages—his most elaborately structured work outside his novel Primetime (2007). Told in 266 couplets, this is Memmott's longest poem. Addressed to his deceased mother, the poem is also his first and only extended apostrophe and his only major autobiographical work. Begun thirty years ago and then titled “Eden Remembered,” this is also his oldest work-in-progress and, finally, his only poem placed in the Nevada desert. Given this provenance, any reader might wonder: Why now? Why would a sustained, complex, unfinished narrative finally assert itself, demand completion now?
        To begin, let's first say that when death called David Memmott back to the desert, he answered that call. In St. George, Utah, his stepfather died of cancer, and a year later, his mother Mary suffered a series of strokes after being hospitalized for a congested heart. Lying in a coma, doctors assured the gathered family their mother was brain-dead. This is Mormon country. As Mary Memmott's eldest son, David had to decide: will he or won't he give the order to remove her from the respirator? He must. Nothing will be the same.
        Cleaning out Mary's apartment, David's sister found an old album back in the closet—black/white photos of two small boys and newspaper clippings about a boy drowning in Florida. His two sisters and brother began to remember their tearful middle-aged mother reading a letter, taking an unexplained trip to Florida. They remembered hints of a secret first marriage, two young sons, a nameless husband. Sitting together in the shadow of recent death, David, his sisters, and younger brother realized they probably had two unknown half-brothers—one still alive somewhere, one probably drowned. Their devoutly unorthodox and loving mother, who saved David from his biological father's violence, became mysterious and complex. Why did she want her past to remain secret? What else has been hidden? Mystified, unresolved, the Memmott children parted, each carrying an album Mary had made for them. David's younger sister took the remaining archive home to Nevada—including that album documenting Mary's first marriage.
        When his younger sister's Las Vegas house burned, most of the family albums were rescued, but one album inexplicably disappeared—the one document of that first marriage. Then one day, about a year after Mary's death, David's younger sister was riding home from Las Vegas in the back of a pickup when the pickup rolled. She was killed. David's niece was killed. Another passenger died. So many shocking family deaths so close together—who could assess the power in such moments? Once more, the Memmott children answered the call from the desert. David and his brother transported the bodies, his youngest sister dressed them for burial, and they conducted a home graveside service. Leaving Nevada, David carried back to Oregon the family archive, minus the album with his mother's long-kept secret.
        Poring over those surviving albums, Memmott felt again the grief of his younger sister's early death and his mother's recent passing. The Nevada desert called him again—the desert of his own childhood. Suddenly, he felt quickened, compelled to write. Going back to an early draft, he found a retrospective introspective narrator pouring lines onto the page—a voice both boy and man, a voice that could shape a recursive story line, a voice that could jostle and juxtapose past and present, action and reflection. With pages of his mother's albums opened before him, he set down his intuitive quest to reveal and understand their shared lives. The backhand violence of his fundamentalist biological father; their flight from Michigan when David was four years old; his new life with his kindly secular stepfather on that remote Nevada cattle ranch—these and other irrepressible memories all came back. Remembering his sense of a childhood paradise where he could ride ponies and confess to owls, he realized his mother had no such refuge. She had escaped from the violence of her marriage in Michigan but ended up pregnant and isolated on a Nevada desert ranch. Back in Grand Rapids and later in Boise, she regularly attended the Assembly of God, but there was no church in the Nevada desert. That same year, her infant son and David's newest brother died shortly after being born. Somewhere, he had another brother buried in the desert.
        As he wrote, he recalled that Mary Memmott had been an intensely private woman, but he wanted to tell her secrets now. She cussed the prying and proselytizing Mormon boys at her door, but believed in miracles and a deity beyond theology. Writing about her life, he could give her mysteries the attention they deserved. Writing about their mutual lives, he could develop, interpret, analyze, organize, evaluate, and resolve. As Mary Memmott's son, he could reclaim his own long-suppressed childhood memories of places, events, and people, and he could bring to the whole work a mature interpretive sensibility rich with mythology, religion, and history.
        Take the time to savor, read, and reread “Where the Yellow Brick Road Turns West.” Here, a son creates a compelling memorial to his secretive mother, and brings us gifts of language that reveal and share his peace with his desert past.

George Venn
12/8/09

Poet, writer, literary historian, editor, linguist, and educator, George Venn (1943) is an eclectic, complex, and distinguished figure in western American literature. His distinguished and eclectic literary practice is best affirmed by Marking the Magic Circle (1987), a collection of fiction, poetry, essays, translations, and Jan Boles photographs. In 1988, this book won a silver medal from Literary Arts; in 2005, the same book was selected by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission as one of the 100 best Oregon books in the two centuries. His website offers more information.