Colleen J. McElroy
Critical Analysis

By Genevieve Lebaron

Colleen McElroy is widely respected as a folklorist and author of short stories, plays, essays and non-fiction writing, in addition to being a prominent poet. Though at one point primarily anecdotal, McElroy’s poetry has expanded to tell stories of lives all around the world with an intense sense of place, identity and the music of language.

McElroy began writing by announcing her unique identity in her own voice, that of a black woman telling her own story in the music that created it. In Music From Home, she writes from a personal perspective, describing the stories and characters of her own life: “Grandma tells me which number to dial./ Then, I learn to wait for private calls/ from boys with three part names.” (“The End of Sisterhood“) Her tone is frequently one of clairvoyance and wisdom, but can at times be resentful as she details the pains of living in a white-dominated culture. In “Snow White in Aliceland,” she describes a woman in town, “Nerve worn with consciousness,/ Afraid I’ll move next door/ They march on anything/ in the name of virtue.” Music From Home tells the story not only of the writer but of the places that shaped her experience of the world with emotionally precise images.

“The sidewalks were long where I grew up,/ they were as veined as the backs/ of my Grandma’s hands.” It is the exactness of the images and the intertwinement of that imagery with the emotion they afford, that weaves McElroy’s poems so tightly. “The heavy oak of table legs/ doubled in pairs/ by oak legs of Mama’s sisters,/ As I hide in a private jungle/ viewing the underside/ of table and kin.”

Following the intense account of St. Louis came poetry collections exploring places and people around the country and later the world. These poems are unique in that McElroy manages to maintain her personal sense of place, detailing the images as precisely and intentionally as she did her home. “But Moroccan land suits her skin/ and she piles the Aryan fantasy of color/ chocolate queen strolling in the sun” (With Josephine in Tangiers) It is in these exquisite details that McElroy successfully bridges the oceans separating the United States and the rest of the world, while maintaining the exoticism of these places and simultaneously describing them in a deep familiarity. She clearly captures the essence of each country in imagery, but also in the accepting tone and wise voice her words embody. Each place lives a thriving and illuminated existence through McElroy’s mastery of language.

This mastery is evident not only in the literary aspects of the poems, but also in the music sounding behind the language. “Villa above my veranda a woman watches/ as her husband pounds rice,/ the sound bouncing from my commode/ to the wrought iron gate until/ the whole hill shakes with each thrust.”
( “Hooking Up with Ray Charles and the Great Percy Sledge in Madagascar” ) If McElroy returned to the same scene in Madagascar, perched next to the woman watching her husband and read those lines of the poem, the woman would be able to interpret much of the poems meaning without knowing the language it was being read in. The rhythm, sharpness of the syllables and the tone that rings in the backdrop of the language would all contribute to the poems’ meaning. If in order to embody the music of language, “the sound must seem an echo to the sense,” (Pope John Paul) McElroy borders on perfect score in such an endeavor.

McElroy’s persuasion of the music in language delivers her messages in the childlike-simplicity, like children’s melodies, despite the often serious subject matter. “This is not a planet I would want to inherit--/ with its inventory of mountainous sorrows/ there is hardly a place to lay a good night’s/ sleep before tomorrow’s bad news arrives,” (A Little Travelling Music) The meaning rings behind every word, it is not necessary for McElroy to convince us literarily of the world’s faults, as the rhythm and combination of her words foregrounds universality of human experience. This melodious language is subtle, and is a consistent characteristic of McElroy’s poetry. Specific poems embody another type of musical influence, stemming from McElroy’s early interest in Jazz and other music forms.

“Drawing in the Dark- A Jazz Monochrome” from Travelling Music begins:
1.tenor sax
Each landscape has its own remark for our lives
nothing is as you imagined
sidemen, slidemen
tomorrow’s moonlight
your children.

This poem is one of many poems that connect the melodies of McElroy’s poetics to the melodies of her influences. It dissects the musical bearings that wind her words; the images, the rhythm and the words as notes all derive from external sources. It is her acute acknowledgement of these external sources and their intertwinement into her work that further the effectiveness of the music ringing in her poems.

McElroy wrote first of her home, then of herself, and later of the larger world. It is her ability to recognize the interconnectedness of these subjects that allow each of them to carry her uniquely strong voice, personal tone and intense sense of place. In “Caution: This Woman Brakes for Memories”, McElroy intertwines images of her past and present homes as well as places she has visited with her unique melody:

When the air is thin with frost
I blow rings of ice smoke
As I did when I was young
And imagined myself grown
And never answering to anyone…

…no easy idiot graffiti of girl
into gril, but loan
into god and home into bog.
One blink and a sign that reads:
Warning: Truck Makes Wide Turns
can be misread as Caution: This
Woman Breaks for Every Turn
and everything is possible…

…The silk calla lilies nodded yes
And I believed them.

Today on the beach at La Push, logs became
Chairs, dead beard, boats with roots like stars and
I was a ship sailing back to the beginning.