My reaction, propelled by a tinge of pride and a mild desperation for his respect, was to blurt out that I had just finished reading John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath. He was polite in his acknowledgement of my efforts and literary interests, but also added that many folks from Oklahoma hold that story in disdain due to its condescending depiction of ‘Okies’ as caricatures of themselves. I suspect part of this disdain rests in the fact that Steinbeck was from California, not Oklahoma.

Cherishing an intimate familiarity with place is core to Myers’ approach to art, a conviction evident in his most recent book of poetry: Black Sunday. This book of poems (mostly sonnets) draws from several primary sources--not least of which are the author’s personal roots fixed deep within the dirt of his beloved home state--to tell the story of a series of characters consumed by the dust bowl of the 1930’s. Caused by an insidious combination of overworked soil, a formidable drought, and national economic forces, this natural disaster clouded and choked Oklahoma and surrounding states for nearly a decade.

One cannot help but compare the work to Steinbeck’s aforementioned masterpiece. Despite being entirely different genres, both books leverage narrative to explore human resiliency in the context of a particular moment of human suffering. For all the literary merit that Steinbeck’s epic possesses, Myers’ book casts darker shades of despair and paints brighter streaks of hope. In a word, the picture he constructs of the place and people is simply more believable; the image-driven narrative resonates with what C.S. Lewis called “that queer twist” that “real things have.” It is less the account of a man fascinated by a snapshot of history, and more a portrait of profoundly tough people enduring devastation with grace, a story crafted by a poet that wields compelling literary power to commemorate an anthropology he dearly loves.

Each character listed in the dramatis personae adds a textured layer of human experience to the story. The character that left the most pronounced impression on me was “The Reverend: The local Presbyterian minister” described as “a transplant from back east.” Apparently the only character not native to the region, this man of the cloth offers an outsider perspective (which is also how I, being from the east, approach this book). His is the voice of a man loosed from the soil of his old life, the voice of a man drifting. Far from the stereotypically prim and proper clergyman, we see this widower serve his community by partaking in the town’s grim “Rabbit Drive,” a communal clubbing of overpopulated rabbits, “until dead jacks in piles filled the street / with fevered meat, diseased, unsafe to eat” (p. 59). Rather than an emotionally static preacher that responds to suffering with trite sayings and pseudo-verses, Myers sculpts a faithful character that also wades through doubt, loss and longing like the rest of us. Eschewing common notions of ministers dwelling safely behind some divine veil, immune to the grime of a broken world, we see “The Reverend Caught in a Duster [Thinking] of His Late Wife”:

Dozens more devastating lines from the Reverend throb within the pages of this book, a collection of literary gems that make him my favorite character in this narrative (not to mention, the Reverend here seems far more theologically sound than the heretical kook from Steinbeck’s novel). Without employing the empty adjective ‘Christlike,’ this symphony of sonnets shows us what Christ is like in a dynamic picture of his servant, “a man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (Isaiah 53:3).

A different reader, a native of Oklahoma for example, might experience a deeper connection with Louise Burns, a child survivor of the dust bowl recalling vivid memories as an adult. One recollection unfolds when “Louise Burns Remembers the Gov’t Cattle Slaughter.” This memory assaults the reader with the haunting sights and sounds of the government’s grisly attempt to bail out farmers on the brink of financial ruin: “They dug a ditch out past the north-side fence / then clapped, shouted, slapped the brittle, bone-stretched hide / and made the big, dumb things to run against / their will into the ditch where they all died” (p. 44). Great poetry plants certain phrases deep into our psyche where they stay long after we read them; like Louise, I won’t soon forget this brutal picture.

Another compelling character is Henry, “the town drunk” who slurs his experience in stanzas blurred by dust and booze: “All day I’m liquid. Stand up. I can’t. Damn / my bones, all wet. Ain’t time to get them dried” (p. 78). Ultimately, Henry appears to run away with the traveling circus, leaving the details of his fate up to the imagination of the reader.

Will and Lily Burns, a farmer and his relentlessly optimistic wife, loom large as humble monuments that fight to live ordinary lives within extraordinary amounts of dirt. Will’s grit to bear the burden of husband, father, and farmer through the dusters is matched by his compassion, a quality that permeates even his interaction with his cattle. While Will contemplates cows choked to death by dust, Lily does perhaps the hardest work of all--she hopes:

Often, incorporating words like ‘hope’ in a poem is a sure step toward the pit of sentimentality. Words like this (add ‘beauty’, ‘soul’, and ‘heart’ to the list) have been so carelessly overused--especially in Christian art--that they lose any weight or meaning. Few understand this better than Myers. However, anchoring the word “hope” in tangible images you can taste and feel (hope for Lily is “wet” in otherwise “scratchy years”) avoids sentimentality while simultaneously rejecting a pretentious code of aestheticism which scoffs at any reference to idealism. To put this word in the title of a poem is to invite criticism from the sophomoric scholar trained to turn up their nose at any reference to the transcendent. Thankfully, Myers cares more about creating beauty than the myopic opinions of dilettantes.

Though each character walks about their gritty world with their own unique limp, Myers weaves each together to tell a collective story. This book does not view its subjects as people fragmented from a whole (indeed, even the most isolated character, Henry, “often sleeps in the Reverend’s barn”); for all its literal haze, this story makes perfectly clear that individuals did not endure the dust bowl—communities did.

Perhaps the most established rule in all of creative writing is the maxim “write what you know.” Myers’ embrace of this principle is what makes the work special. However, the subtle irony is that Myers did not actually live through the dust bowl or the Great Depression. This is the great challenge of crafting a creative project grounded in historical tragedy. In his important article The Holocaust’s Uneasy Relationship With Literature, Menachem Kaiser outlines the dangers of using the Holocaust as a setting for literary works:

Good literature makes artistic demands, flexes and contorts narratives, resists limpid morality, compromises reality's details. Regarding the Holocaust, this seems unconscionable, even blasphemous. The horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald need no artistic amplification.

There are horrors scattered throughout human history that are simply difficult to explore artistically with the accuracy and gravity they deserve. Admittedly, the dust bowl is not the Holocaust—each allude to different degrees of tragedy. Nevertheless, the weight of historical truth and the burden of actual suffering sit on the shoulders of any artist that dares tackle these subjects.

Since I did not live through the dust bowl either, it is impossible for me to evaluate whether Black Sunday does justice to historical reality. Fortunately, I was able to ask Myers about this issue when I interviewed him on the Forefront 360 podcast. He cited several measures he took during a research period to avoid romanticizing the dust bowl, including a study of Ken Burns 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl and interviews with eyewitnesses. Additionally, the incorporation of actual photographs of the landscape from the 1930’s pay homage to the historical reality of the event.

The most remarkable element of this book is the way it accomplishes two things at once: it faithfully represents the particular place and people caught in the dust bowl and it tells a story that people far removed from Oklahoma can grasp. The images are specific, yet broad. The people are local, yet universal. By narrowing in on extremely specific details that only a limited audience has direct familiarity with, Myers widens the scope of this work, inviting all of us to hope for beauty even in the black of pain.