Voice to Voice in the Dark by Tim Hunt (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Voice to Voice in the Dark by Tim Hunt
• Jeanetta Mish

Tim Hunt, Voice to Voice in the Dark. Frankfort, KY: Broadstone Books, 2022. 112 pp. Paperback, $25, $18.50 direct from publisher.

Tim Hunt's Voice to Voice in the Dark explores the philosophical conundrum of everyday space-time and its relationship to memory and story. The collection consists mostly of narrative poems; however, Hunt's facility with figurative language lends lyricism to the work. In "New Orleans to Austin" weariness is "a tired we finger like a bruise" (19). The speaker of "Dreaming of Trains" relates his life as a hobo whose pack is "a deep hole in the darker night" (11). In "Three Ways to Pick Prunes" the speaker's harvest work bestows "benedictions of fallen fruit" (41). [End Page 396]

The first poem after the prologue, "Vachel Lindsay Walks the Roads of Kansas Offering Poems for Bread," introduces two themes of the collection: the lives of ordinary people and meditations on memory, on past and present and "here" and "there." In the fifth stanza of "Vachel Lindsay" the poem's focus shifts from the famous poet who traded poems for food and shelter to those who shared with him their homes and meals. The speaker recognizes that their hospitality is itself a kind of a poem, "the one / they understand. / The one they / do not think of as a poem" (6).

Whitmanesque worker-portrait poems include "New Orleans to Austin," which documents an "all night bus trip" undertaken to study Kerouac's papers. In a section of the poem about fellow bus travelers, Hunt writes with tenderness about a young girl and her father, a welder. The girl's father talked of the ordinary things: "walking the girders as the buildings / took shape, the welding, / the moving from job to job—" (18). "Swing Shift" imagines the repetitious life of an assembler who stands "within a circle of light" as if he were made "for this, for / this, for // this" (9).

Again and again Hunt interrogates the irrealities of past and present, here and there. In "A Photo You Meant to Take," he writes of the postmodern preference for simulacra, that "it is the seeming to be old that counts," and that "the past is an accent, a decor" (23). "A Grammar of Things" begins, "Things survive past their time," then parses the preference for newness, born of a desire to erase the past terrors of World War II: lime green formica tabletops replaced those of stone "because it says new, says now; / just as dacron and rayon and nylon say now, say different / . . . / it says future, as if then were a dream / no longer dreamed—a long ago the war erased" (32).

In "The Boy, Discovering Leadbelly, Hears Things He Doesn't Understand" Hunt writes of the education in racism gained from Leadbelly's "voice—pained, / boisterous and sly," and how the songs exist in a time "both now and then, and you might walk with it / in that now it lines out that is neither now or then" (43).

Poems of the third section, "In That Time When Time is Not Measured," make explicit the collection's emphasis on story-as-remembrance, which collapses then, there and, instead, creates [End Page 397] in their telling now, here. In a multipart long poem entitled "The Circle," veterans gather to remember World War II: "In the circle the men are both then / and now, as if then an echo / and now still then . . ." (85). At first the men share only safe stories, anecdotes of soldier-life worn smooth by many tellings. In later gatherings they begin to share untold stories that haunt them: a battery-lead knife handle thrown at an enemy combatant, its weight "crumpling the tiny man into the mesh of vines . . ." (77). Another story relates the lingering grief and guilt of a (then) seventeen-year-old's inability to save a drowning comrade from a sinking ship: "and the body falls away . . . // and his hand still holding the hand / saved from the silence of the screaming water" (84). "The Circle" and other poems in the section reveal that the timelessness of story...