Book Review :: Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender

Review by Jami Macarty
The poems of Cory Lavender’s Come One Thing Another form a “chromosomal / bridge of inheritance, progenitors resurrected.” Informed by his family’s lore, Lavender recounts the “crackling murmur” between generations while dispensing with categorical divisions between genre (poetry and memoir) and persona (poet and narrator).
Come One Thing Another is a collection of memoiristic poetry. Cory Lavender is the person recording the lives of his “Milk Father,” an uncle accidentally shot over the “fate of [his] heifer,” an aunt who survived the Depression, and a great grandmother with a bad temper, among others on his mother’s and father’s sides of the family.
The Roy and Lavender families are chock full of rebellious, tell-it-like-it-is characters with ties to Africa, Jamaica, Germany, and Nova Scotia. Lavender, the poet among them, writes idiomatically and colloquially, giving voice to and “capturing” his relatives’ “likenesses” in rangy poems that offer opinions on deer hunting, plastics pollution, lobster prices, and “Hard Times” that affect the way of life of his family, who farm and hunt the land in a “guns and grub” relationship that makes them intimately aware of change. “Nothing like it used to be.”
To “extend remembrance” is at the heart of what motivates Lavender to write his family story. The poet is also writing to address the “shadows” and “tangle” regarding his place in his family tree.
Necessarily, a few poems address the fact that he, like his father, “grew up unaware he’s mixed,” “half-ashamed of [his] signature curls.” In the poem “Fort Cory,” the most self-telling poem within the collection, the poet confesses feeling “embarrassed writing this.” Such are the personal and artistic pressures to measure up to the “hallowed coordinates” of the people he loves.
Despite being “Besieged by insecurities,” Cory Lavender walks his own “stretch of shore” in his “cobbled ode” and heartfelt memorial.
Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender. Gaspereau Press, August 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.