Linda Annas Ferguson is a poet well known in South Carolina, and is carving out a reputation throughout the South. She lived in the Baltimore area for a couple of years but her career never had traction here, though she did frequent the Harford Poetry Society and made friends there. Baltimore and its poetry scene in the early part of this decade ignored her. A shame. Ms Ferguson has bloomed as a poet. Her latest book, Dirt Sandwich, is an amazing display of mature poetry. Though her subject matter may have been garnered from the South, she is not just a regional poet. Any intelligent reader who takes their poetry seriously should enjoy the precision and concision of her poems. Exhibit A is “Topless Dancer” which I will quote in its entirety to show the vivid imagery and the craft employed in fashioning a poem.

Laced throughout this poem are subtleties of sound, shifts of psychological perspective and the skilled use of metaphor. In the fourth stanza we seem to witness the dancer and the truck driver exchanging views of each other. Is the beer bottle not an apt symbol? Ms Ferguson has captured in words what is almost beyond words.
The book contains memory and the memory of loss. Though some of the poems are mythic in subject, Adam or Noah imagined, the strongest poems are those that come from the poet’s personal memory. Her mother is such a central figure. Ms Ferguson brings her alive and recreates in the reader’s mind the culture and time in which she lived. It was a hardscrabble existence. It was the poor white South. “Promises” begins

The Bible, so important in the culture of the South, perhaps more than in any other region of the country, provides context with lines of verse from Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, introducing the narrative of many of the poems. Ms Ferguson’s universe is most of all moral. A childhood friend tells the narrator in “Noises in the Living Room” that she blames herself for her mother’s caning by the father. Perhaps there is a bit of Flannery O’Connor in Ms Ferguson’s vision, and Faulkner would have been at home in that world that she brings to life again. However, this collection of poetry is as contemporary as the scientific idea that the son has in the poem “The Rapture”

The humanity and the imagery in the poems are its spectacular achievements. The reader does not have to be a scholar to enjoy this book. The complex vision is expressed with imaginative simplicity. Ms Ferguson’s poems should light bonfires of empathy in our hearts. Our minds? We will be like that truck driver in the “Topless Dancer”, amazed at a finely sculptured, organic body of work. Perhaps some of us at times will be wiping tears into our hair.