I live in a suburb of St. Louis. If asked what they know, most people might think of the Gateway Arch on the riverfront, or the St. Louis Cardinals. Before I moved here more than 40 years ago, that was all I knew. Living here, I’ve found my most surprising experience to be living in a hilly city. St. Louis is in the foothills of the Missouri Ozarks. Drive southwest, toward Springfield, and the hills become increasingly more serious.
I think of the Missouri Ozarks as Dave Malone country. His poetry springs from the Ozark landscape, and it’s not all about hills. And it springs from the people of the Ozarks, his own family, the people he grew up with, and the people he knows. This is not the Winter’s Bone or Ozark of Hollywood’s imagination, but the real landscape of where one grows up, and where one’s family and friends still live.
As the poems of Malone’s newest collection, Tornado Drill, demonstrate, that landscape is not so different from the ones the rest of us grew up in, and live in.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
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