Produce Wagon: New and Selected Poems by Roy Scheele (review)

Reviewed by: Produce Wagon: New and Selected Poems by Roy Scheele Mark Sanders Roy Scheele, Produce Wagon: New and Selected Poems. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 238 pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book, $19.95. Roy Scheele’s Produce Wagon: New and Selected Poems, the latest in Ted Kooser’s Contemporary Poetry series, is a collection long overdue. Featuring a generous selection of more than 120 poems, Produce Wagon represents Scheele’s lifetime achievement—a staggering half-century of poetry writing—from his earliest chapbook, Accompanied (1974), to uncollected and new poems. This book’s publication is something to celebrate. Just to clarify, Produce Wagon renews my long-held fondness for Scheele’s poetry. As a young man growing up on Nebraska’s Great Plains, I sought poetry in the voice of Plains-speaking people; and, at age nineteen, I found Scheele and his contemporaries: Kloefkorn, Kooser, Don Welch, Kuzma, Deal, and Kathleen K. West. These poets were principal influences of Nebraska’s literary renaissance, at the head of the poetry and little press movement of the 1970s, which, to this day, persists in my home state. I bought Accompanied when it was first published and also found Scheele’s work in a number of Nebraska’s small journals. Then, years later, I met him at a reading at Lincoln’s Sheldon Museum of Art when he shared a copy of Noticing (1979). Significant things arose from these early encounters. One, Accompanied (along with Kooser’s A Local Habitation and A Name) served as a model for short, Plains-centered lyrics; two, Kuzma’s work as publisher of Accompanied (and of Best Cellar Press) excited my desire to start a small press. Scheele’s Noticing was critical [End Page 176] to my decision, and I began Sandhills Press in 1979 due, in large part, to Scheele’s encouragement. As a young poet, though, I hoped to write about things I knew, as my Nebraska counterparts were doing. I read everything of Scheele’s I could find and, years forward, published two of his books, Pointing Out the Sky (1985) and Short Suite (1997) on Sand-hills imprints. I have read his poetry for nearly as long as he has written it; the University of Nebraska Press’s publication of Produce Wagon renews my kinship to Scheele’s work and confirms I was right about it all along. But this is mere context. The value, ultimately, is in the poems, and Produce Wagon bears an abundance of exceptional fruit. Scheele is master of the short lyric. Often imagistic, often reflective and deeply musical, his lyrics draw readers to intimacies of person, place, or thing (to echo Karl Shapiro) that hold us attentive, watching and listening. Consider “Remembrances” (3), where Scheele devises associations between winged creatures to circumstances and to people deserving remembrance. Scheele writes about a cardinal “in her nest in the bare forsythia,” “to remember / that lucid evening [your mother] pointed it out to me.” The poet, for himself, chooses “the hawk and that winter / day I turned . . . / and was gathered up in its eyes.” For his wife, “the little bat we rumpled with our / breathing,” a “mammal / whose sight is its flight.” The poem’s first position in the book is unmistakable: “Remembrances” is the introduction to and design of Scheele’s work overall. As in Wordsworth’s moments recalled in tranquility, the poem avows lucidity and clarity—when unintelligible forces of a world “too much with us” do not rend human hearts or minds. Notice, also, how creature and human experiences resonate, from nesting, to watching, and awakening. Notice, again, the bat’s wings are small, as Scheele’s poems are, “no wider than the spread of my hand.” From such smallness comes poetic flight. Scheele’s attention to smallness and keen detail is pervasive. Time and again, he guides us through infinitesimal landscapes that open, proportionately, into larger territories. In “The Welcome Mat,” for example, a spider spins “an exacting string” and “waits to see if the moonlight / can cross to her safe on that footing” (4). This brilliant four-line poem is hardly about spiders and webs. Rather, it [End Page 177] is a metaphor...