The Tethered
Ground by Lanette Cadle
The Tethered Ground by Lanette Cadle, Topeka, Kansas:
Woodley Press, 2019
I got to know the poet Lanette Cadle in Ohio, and we have
continued our friendship in Missouri, but make no mistake: Cadle is a Kansan,
through and through. She is also an observant one, and this shows in her premier
collection The Tethered Ground.
Cadle’s love for her home state is apparent through the
level of attention she pays to its animals, its neighborhoods, its people—even
its winds. The title poem, which takes pole position in the book, offers a
close look at the weather:
The clouds press
the ground today, rolling in
and dropping
buckets before they roll out
fast as sin. It’s
hard to be lighthearted, even though
I know it’s just
the barometer and will pass.
My body hears the
message it sends—run
and hide. The
storms are coming. …
This poem contains a sentence I love for its simplicity: “Soft
clouds, // hard times,” before offering the observation that “if not for this
tethered ground we would float away.” And it’s true—gravity, both kinds, keep
us rooted, as so many of Cadle’s poems demonstrate.
The poet’s reliable eye for the weather continues in the
stunning “On Living Too Far South for Snow.” People who live in the southern
United States are aware that northern neighbors scoff at us—how a light
spitting of snow can shut the entire region down. Only thing is, the snow isn’t
the problem; it’s the ice that comes with it, the product of precipitation and
freezing and thawing and freezing again. Cadle writes about this, and in doing
so, she demonstrates the ruthlessness of Kansas weather. The poem begins, “It
snows, but not that often. Serious snow / is a legend imported from other
states.” It continues,
Too much ice
is more likely, and
with it, tree limbs, downed wires,
and dead plantings
that don’t come back. My granny
used to snap off
the top of saplings to see
if they were alive
or dead, a fifty-fifty shot
after a Kansas
winter.
The very next poem in the book belies some of its
predecessor’s claims, and begins, “Forget what I said earlier. It snows here / all
the time.” This one outlines how people get lost and freeze on the way to the mailbox
or die in a neighbor’s yard. Kansas doesn’t accept slights easily.
There is more to this book than observations about Kansas,
but it does seem to offer a Kansas point of view, even when talking about seemingly
unrelated topics, like overcoming cancer or losing a friend. It’s the
unflinching view, I think—the willingness to tell hard truths in a
straightforward way—that feels like a Midwestern mode to me. It’s a voice we
don’t hear nearly enough, and I recommend The Tethered Ground to hear
those earnest cadences.
