Roy Bentley’s collection celebrates and mourns the late twentieth century with a series of personal memories that are sure to connect with any self-reflective reader. Late in the collection, Bentley posits the question: “But isn’t that what poems do, offer reasons? Isn’t that poetry?” (50). By the time a reader reaches this question, it will seem rhetorical as the prior forty-nine pages are filled with musings, reasons, and crucial reflections on humanity. The poems develop nostalgic landscapes marked by packed drive-ins (“The Last Drive-In in Newark, Ohio Closes”), rock-and-roll eight-tracks (“Ankh”), and pot smoke (“World Enough and Time”) that set the stage for Bentley’s commentary. He populates scenes with people cycling through his life, proving his exceptional skill for acute observation. Childhood in Ohio with family ties to Kentucky serve as the bedrock for his perspective, but his unique insights are equally shaped by growing militarization of the US throughout the 1900s. For every rosy image of time spent with a lover over a joint, there is a stark moment of childhood fear induced by nuclear threat in poems such as “My Father Is a Good Man, If by ‘Good’ You Mean Someone Who Lets His Kid Play in a Fallout Shelter the October JFK Has Said He Will Not Back Down.” Bentley’s own reflections become time stamps, leading the reader through decades of turmoil that shaped the country. The collection is honest and balanced in this way. It rejects a simple narrative of the nation nearing the turn of the century by presenting complex events and emotions of the times through a vividly specific life. Readers are thrust behind the wheel of now-vintage cars, into the cockpit of a plane, and into various small-town locales to explore Bentley’s own triumphs and tragedies, but each reminiscence draws relatable struggles of love, loss, and life’s purpose to the surface. Reading the three sections of poems resembles a tour of Bentley’s history structured to tap into the larger human experience in the States.

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Roy Bentley is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City, chosen by Billy Collins as a finalist for the Miller Williams poetry prize; Starlight Taxi, winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize; The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, chosen by John Gallaher as winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize; as well as My Mother’s Red Ford: New & Selected Poems 1986 – 2020 published by Lost Horse Press. Poems have appeared in Pembroke Magazine, The Southern Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, and Prairie Schooner among others. His latest is Beautiful Plenty (Main Street Rag, 2021).

Aaron Cole is the Book Review Editor of Pembroke Magazine and a frequent contributor to our pages. He works as a lecturer in the Department of English, Literature, and World Languages at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Aaron graduated from Western Carolina University, where he earned a BA in English with a minor in creative writing, a BS in education, and an MA in English with a concentration in the literature and theory of the Global South.