Quantcast

Model Home by Jay Hall Carpenter

Source: GBF
Paperback, 61 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Model Home by Jay Hall Carpenter is a collection reflecting on the homes we build, beginning with the landscape of “Common Ground,” in which the inside of a home may not be tenable but the land around it may be familiar and a place to start when building connections.

One of my favorite poems in this collection also speaks to connection, but in a way that kids and the kids within us will understand — the moments of our days. “Like Kids” explores the spontaneity and the curiosity of childhood, allowing us to shrug off adulthood and its responsibilities to run with the kids after the ice cream headache. These moments are fleeting, and as the string of our kites breaks and the kite drifts off into the air, we are made aware of the past and the present all at once. It is hopeful yet saddening.

“Model Home” speaks to the surface seen by others, but opens the doors wide to expose the fissures of family and the imperfections that we house. Carpenter has a deft hand in these poems, and even as many of them rhyme (something I don’t prefer as a reader), I was captivated. His ability to rhyme without distracting me as a reader was a welcomed surprise (though I have read a children’s manuscript he wrote and that rhymed, so I’m not sure why I should be surprised).

You’ll want to take your time touring Jay Hall Carpenter’s Model Home, scrutinizing the decor, exploring the dark corners, sledding down the snowy hills, examining the model home we, as America, pretend to be for the rest of the world. Our home may not be as perfect as we market it to be.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Jay Hall Carpenter is an author and artist living in Maryland. His written works include plays, musicals, children’s books, and poetry. For several years he published The ACE Occasionally, a small literary humor magazine. “Dark and Light” is his first collection of poetry.

Carpenter’s career in the visual arts spans forty years and began at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where he designed 520 of the Cathedral’s sculptural embellishments, including gargoyles and angels. His public sculptures, monuments, smaller bronzes, and drawings can be found throughout the United States and at JayHallCarpenter.com.

Mailbox Monday #660

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Velvet, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

This is what we received:

Model Home by Jay Carpenter for review.

“As you visit Jay Hall Carpenter’s Model Home, be sure to savor the window dressings, the freshly painted walls, the pine-beamed attic and that deeply dug root cellar.  Enjoy the rhyming sounds in the trees out back.  Pay attention to the whispers inside the garage — the cobwebs and spills.  Yes, his house of poems opens wide doors of yearning and wonder, hosts you and your memories with welcoming acceptance and with filled-full basins of understanding.  Especially enjoy poems such as “Like Kids” or “Day Lilies” or “Open Book.”  They are hallway mirrors that won’t let you walk by without a long, long look.”  

– Hiram Larew, Undone

“From its opening pages Jay Hall Carpenter’s collection, Model Home, lives up to its ironic title. The poet blends Biblical allusions with modern sensibilities in such poems as “Loaves and Fishes,” in which Christ appears as a blissed-out hippie. The speaker’s assertion that “A lotta folks walked around/In a beard and sandals that summer” lends immediacy to the familiar story. Carpenter’s mastery of diction shows up again in “Job Search”:  formal language is both fussy and funny in the mouth of a 21st-century grammarian.  The poet’s attention to language shows up in sonnets, odes, and carefully observed portraits such as the clever “Would-be Robot,” an examination of the truism that we never turn out exactly as our parents wish.  Model Home is a funny, frightening look at the physical and emotional wounds of our first families.”

– Laura Shovan, Takedown

“Jay Carpenter writes with an irreverence that can only come from having deep reverence for the things that make us most human—loves, losses, regrets, pain, joy, bodies used well and misused heartbreakingly.  It’s not often that a few lines can make you laugh, ache, and then say, aloud, “Wow,” in a kind of awed and gutted way. Carpenter is a poet who knows that irreverence is the only way to approach the most holy things.”

-Faith Salie, Approval Junkie, Emmy winner

What did you receive?