The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Same Blue Chevy by Gale Renée Walden
Nicole Cooley

Gale Renée Walden. Same Blue Chevy. Tia Chucha Press, 1996. 72 pp. Paper: $10.95.

In her first book of poetry Gale Walden takes us on a journey to a place where God assumes many forms: he is a camera man, he plays double-clutch jump rope with little girls, he is America, the country everyone talks about “in hushed tones.” We move from the floor to the ceiling, from earth to heaven, and, in the world of this collection, we are just as likely to find God on the ceiling as we are in heaven. In the poem that opens the book, “Moving,” we are told that “A preacher’s family doesn’t own anything / except its mobility and the picture / of a white-haloed Jesus.” Religion, mobility, and the speaker’s attempts to come to terms with the life of a preacher’s daughter recur in these poems: “I kneel at the foot of my bed / and always God is above, / grand and distant, like a movie.”

Yet religion is just one of several cultural narratives that Walden gracefully weaves into her poems, narratives that she unsettles. History, specifically American history, also becomes a crucial site of questioning. The poems bear witness to the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s all of which have become narratives that constitute late twentieth-century American life. In fact, this book is about the construction and creation of narrative, the stories that compose a sense of community and the stories we tell ourselves in the dark when we are alone.

Alone or with others, the speaker in these poems explores the relation of community and exile. Thus it is not incidental that the poems return again and again to the landscape of the Midwest, both rural and urban, the prairie and the city. Cornfields turn into streets, and the speaker looks for some sense of home. (It is not surprising to find several references to The Wizard of Oz, a narrative about the experience of a young girl who wants to make the difficult journey home.) But Walden’s poems eschew sentimentality because of their wonderfully sharp sense of irony. While the poems pose questions about faith and belief and what it means to be faithful, this faith exists within a realm of experience in which the Devil can walk down Van Buren in Chicago and not stop “for Elvis himself.” An easy nostalgia is notably subverted by the book’s title, taken from the poem “At the Movies:” “Memory is just desire / reversed Same blue Chevy.” Thus, memory and desire are two sides of the same coin, and, as the speaker says in the book’s final poem, “Because I have not learned how to pray / I listen.” This “listening” has generated an important new book of poems. [Nicole Cooley]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Same Blue Chevy by Gale Renée Walden Nicole Cooley Gale Renée Walden. Same Blue Chevy. Tia Chucha Press, 1996. 72 pp. Paper: $10.95. In her first book of poetry Gale Walden takes us on a journey to a place where God assumes many forms: he is a camera man, he plays double-clutch jump rope with little girls, he is America, the country everyone talks about “in hushed tones.” We move from the floor to the ceiling, from earth to heaven, and, in the world of this collection, we are just as likely to find God on the ceiling as we are in heaven. In the poem that opens the book, “Moving,” we are told that “A preacher’s family doesn’t own anything / except its mobility and the picture / of a white-haloed Jesus.” Religion, mobility, and the speaker’s attempts to come to terms with the life of a preacher’s daughter recur in these poems: “I kneel at the foot of my bed / and always God is above, / grand and distant, like a movie.” Yet religion is just one of several cultural narratives that Walden gracefully weaves into her poems, narratives that she unsettles. History, specifically American history, also becomes a crucial site of questioning. The poems bear witness to the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s all of which have become narratives that constitute late twentieth-century American life. In fact, this book is about the construction and creation of narrative, the stories that compose a sense of community and the stories we tell ourselves in the dark when we are alone. Alone or with others, the speaker in these poems explores the relation of community and exile. Thus it is not incidental that the poems return again and again to the landscape of the Midwest, both rural and urban, the prairie and the city. Cornfields turn into streets, and the speaker looks for some sense of home. (It is not surprising to find several references to The Wizard of Oz, a narrative about the experience of a young girl who wants to make the difficult journey home.) But Walden’s poems eschew sentimentality because of their wonderfully sharp sense of irony. While the poems pose questions about faith and belief and what it means to be faithful, this faith exists within a realm of experience in which the Devil can walk down Van Buren in Chicago and not stop “for Elvis himself.” An easy nostalgia is notably subverted by the book’s title, taken from the poem “At the Movies:” “Memory is just desire / reversed Same blue Chevy.” Thus, memory and desire are two sides of the same coin, and, as the speaker says in the book’s final poem, “Because I have not learned how to pray / I listen.” This “listening” has generated an important new book of poems. [Nicole Cooley]

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