This little book was a pleasant find when I recently went through a box (one of many) of my mother’s books and photo albums. I first met President Carter when I was a teenager and he was the Governor of our state. I later went on to march in his inaugural parade as a member of the UGA Redcoat Band in 1977. I never knew, though, that he’d had a book of poetry published in 1995. To be honest, I don't believe every entry can be defined as “poetry” as many pieces in the collection seemed to be short essays awkwardly grouped into verses to resemble a poem. However, there were treasures and many selections that used humor, honesty, vulnerability, and humility to evoke emotions and move me. A poem entitled “I Wanted to Share My Father's World” almost perfectly described my relationship with my own father and, thus, was my favorite.

U.S. Presidents, with a few conspicuous exceptions, are prolific writers. Only Jimmy Carter among them ever published a book of poetry, which certainly makes one wonder how many dabbled in verse over the years without putting themselves under that particular microscope. Carter revealed himself in these poems, though this self was not too different from his public persona. The poems are a self-portrait of a humble, curious, and passionate admirer of righteousness and detester of hypocrisy, who believed in the goodness of his people and made no excuses for their faults. The author was a man of faith, a farmer and woodsman, a scientist, a sailor, and an advocate for the arts and for artists, and incidentally a fairly successful politician. Not such a complicated guy, is he?

These are amateur poems in the best sense of the word, as they were written to express a powerful love inside of their author, and make up for their lack of professional finesse with a wide-open honesty and a good eye for the deeper significance of the mundane. He makes no secret of how his subjects make him feel, and he invites us to feel it with him, in the best tradition of popular poetry.

I do not read poetry much and I found some of President Carter’s work to be difficult to follow. His stories were beautiful and touching, but at times I was unsure on how to read it in flowing form. But overall, great collection!

Down to earth, relatable yet personal. I enjoyed these simple and beautiful poems that resonated.

© 1995. He manages to use a conversational tone and also some of the classical poetic techniques of meter and rhyme. The content of his poems is the stuff of life common to everyone, but told through the specifics of his own life growing up in the rural South. It's obvious the man has his priorities straight–he knows what's important in life and celebrates it. He knows human nature, good and bad, and shows it for all to see. A book that encourages open-mindedness, loyalty and love, without being preachy.

I don't know if Jimmy Carter has a poetic voice or not. Still the stories relayed are very touching. I have grown fond of Carter as a man, and it is his writing (more often essays) which has done this. Thoughtful and sometimes comical. Very telling of the place and times he grew up.

As far as I can discover, Jimmy Carter is the only American president ever to publish a book of poetry. The quality is uneven, but some of the best poems here are quite good.

Sweet Jimmy Carter. Simple yet deep poems. Loved the illustrations by his granddaughter.

Selected this to read after President Carter passed away. The poems gave a look inside Jimmy's life in Plains, Georgia as well as his travels and life in the White House. Enjoyed reading them because he always lived his life with compassion and integrity. Much missed and needed in today's current political climate. 3.5/5

I used to be automatically hostile to celebrity books of verse, but I've mellowed thanks to the ravages of time, exhaustion, despair. Now I have to actually read some of the poems in order to reach old levels of Yosemite Sam-levels of sputtering.

Difficult Times

I try to understand.
I've seen you draw away
and show the pain.
It's hard to know what I can say
to turn things right again,
to have the coolness melt,
to share once more
the warmth we've felt. (p. 91)

Sufferin' succotash! This is just pitiful. It doesn't even qualify as greeting card verse (a much-maligned form of verse that deserves respect as a commercial enterprise, as the work of professions). Carter's verse here shows the importance of "show don't tell," that beginning writer workshop advice that is so valuable. Vague, non-specific ("show the pain" how?), and a bungled attempt at figural language (ice melts, but does "coolness" melt?). It does at least have some form, rhyme, but even here you have to picture Carter's Georgia twang pronouncing "pain/again" in what might be a comical fashion.

There's a lot of vague geo-political virtue-signaling going on too in this slim volume of verse:

A Battle Prayer

All those at war
Pray to obtain
God's blessing.
It's with those in pain. (p. 73)

As some might say about Carter's foreign policy, this is both high-minded and incoherent.

Why We Get Cheaper Tires from Liberia

The miles of rubber trees bend from the sea.
Each of the million acres cost a dime
nearly two Liberian lives ago.
Sweat, too,
has poured like sap from trees, almost free,
from men coerced to work by poverty
and leaders who had sold the people's fields... (p. 83)

Firestone's trees gets a shout-out towards the end, which seems a bit unfair - are other tire manufacturers more humane, less exploitive? Seems like a lot of tires come from China these days; is this better for Liberia? That Carter tackles these topics is admirable - the gross unfairness of the world, the inequalities, the suffering "over there" so we can get cheap stuff. But it is so clumsy!

The plantation kiln's pink bricks
made the homes of overseeing whites
a corporation's pride.
Walls of the same polite bricks divide
the workers' tiny stalls
like cells in honeycombs;
no windows breach the walls,
no pipes or wires bring drink or light
to natives who can never claim
this place as theirs
by digging in the ground..." (p. 83)

It's not the what that bothers me here, but the how; the contrast between overseers and the workers is so sketchy, so vague that a sense of pathos, urgency that Carter may have intended never has a chance. Why would these overseers' homes constitute "corporation's pride"? Corporations take pride in their quarterly earnings if anything. Windows don't "breach" walls; although I know what he means, to "breach a wall" is more of a violent, negative thing, breaching the castle walls you know. Windows are a good thing, but because of Carter's inept handing (using the wrong word, basically), they come off as a bad thing. Wires for light mean power plants and I'll bet Carter doesn't like those! It makes me want to re-read "The Heart of Darkness," where the misery and the corporate-worker contrast is horrifying.

***

The problem with writing poems, from T. S. Eliot on down to Jimmie Carter, is that poetry tends to reveal things, a lot of things you may not have realized you were revealing. This is why, I think, Eliot famously said "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

But is it fair to say Jimmy Carter lacks emotions or personality? Is it fair to say that about anybody? Jimmy Carter, a nonagenarian in hospice as I type this, is a kind of American secular saint, and he does seem to be a decent man; his post-presidential work with Habitat for Humanity is admirable. And once he boils off the poetic sour mash, he can distill some white lightning - not very often, but it is there:


And at the livery stable, one old man
Would always interrupt his checker game
To heckle me. He'd miss the brass spittoon
To spray right at my feet, and then he'd try
To make me sing a song or dance a jig;
I never would, nor cut my price -- but I
Would sometimes feed the mules or sweep the floors
To make a sale.

I loved to deal with drummers
Toting case of their goods to stores.
I think they saw me as a kindred soul
And bought from me the way they hoped to sell. (p. 44)

There is a lot to like here in an autobiographical sense. When Carter foregoes the "gorgeous" versifying and just tells things plainly, he reveals a lot - here you see his energy, tough-mindedness, resistance to anything that was going to diminish him - you can see, perhaps, a bit of that ambition that got Carter to the White House. And you can see his sympathy for other strivers. Just the bit on drummers added a star to this review ("drummer" is an old-fashioned term for a traveling salesman); salesmen take a beating in literature ("Death of a Salesman" is typical). So far in my reading, only Jimmy Carter here and Primo Levy have ever had anything good to say about a salesman.

Carter tries in several places to display his sympathy and understanding for Black people. But as a product of his time, he doesn't seem to understand the dire predicament that people face who are not only poor, but also Black. In the passage above, for instance, refusing that loathsome old man's demand to "sing a song or dance a jig" would not have been an option had Carter been a small Black boy selling peanuts down at the livery stable. But at least Carter paid attention, remembered it, and wrote it down. It is a lot better than a lot of the Cracker Barrel "good old days" nonsense you hear. The good old days were awful, even awfuller than nowadays I'll bet.

Which is to say, Carter is at his best when he sticks to autobiography:

My First Try for Votes

Uneasy in my first campaign,
I feared the likely ridicule,
but got up nerve and neared
some loafers I saw shooting pool.

I caught the eye of an older man
who seemed to know who I might be.
When I went up to him to speak
he cocked a bleary eye at me.

"Now, wait, don't tell me who you are,"
he shouted out. I stood in dread.
Bystanders paused. I blabbed my name.
He frowned. "Naw, that ain't it," he said. (p. 67)

Not bad. The rhyme ridicule/shooting pool is clever and witty. Not Yeats, but not a waste of time.

This book is the poetic testimony that we say good-bye to a wonderful genuinely great man who lived 100 years, humbly, peacably, with integrity of speaking truth as a poet as well as author of prose. A great man who made it to the White House as president and did even more for the world after leaving office.

I rather enjoyed this book of poems by our former President, showed be a great deal of insight into his compassion for his fellow human beings. A book to keep and re-read passages from time-to-time.