Tamp: Poems by Denton Loving

Denton Loving’s poetry collection, Tamp, is a soft whisper of grief in which the poet and narrator are indistinguishable. The book begins with a “dead father” driving and ends with the poet “hanging photos of my own tears on the walls of a gallery / naming each one to correspond to the events of their creation.” Between these instances of sorrow, Loving has written a sort of pastoral elegy, in which the rural existence of his youth calls up, again and again, nostalgia for lives that once were, both his and his late father’s. 

Images recur: the soil, the mountains, the cows. Often these appear in dreams, creating a style that at times borders on magical realism. These images and dreams are sacred to Loving, who says in “Another River to the Underworld”: “sleep is another kind of prayer.”

The tittle of the collection comes from “The Fence Builder,” in which the grieving narrator learns a lesson from an unlikely source: “My graves don’t rise or sink / the grave digger says after I show him // the place to bury my father. // … Some people just push their pile of dirt back in. / But I tamp the dirt at every level.” The grave digger is then described as one of “those men who work the earth,” and such, Loving turns the hardest act of burying a loved one into a hopeful image in which the narrator believes his father is being planted like a seed from which something wonderful might grow. 

These poems are meditative, though-provoking, and complex. They return often to that merger of the pastoral and the elegiac. This shows most clearly in “After My Father Died, I Marveled,” in which the narrator distracts himself from the loss by contemplating chickens, cows, and phoebes, as well as how ordinary life for everyone else continues. Loving writes: “I was too spent / to cry or / be angry / or feel anything except / the motion of it all.”

Tamp is not a book to be entered lightly. The poems have been crafted with the grave digger’s precision. Perhaps these poems are what grew from the seed that was planted.

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Ace Boggess is author of the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody, but is known more for his four books of poetry: I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled. His writing, both poetry and prose, has appeared in hundreds of literary journals, including Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, The Bellingham Review, Rattle, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly, J Journal, Mid-American Review, and Southern Humanities Review. He received a fellowship for fiction from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison, an experience he writes about with intensity and humor.