Pout of Tangerine Tango by Victoria Garton

Victoria Garton’s Pout of Tangerine Tango is a remarkable study in restraint and specificity. Her exploration of Hungary and Poland in 1998, which is the subject of this collection, harvests and sifts her memory of travels to post-Soviet Eastern Europe. In her title poem, a printed Madonna on a pennant twirled, “Her lips/in a pout of Tangerine Tango, the very shade/I wore in junior high.” Garton scuffed among vegetable rows planted on a former killing field, where “swollen melons/on hardened ground roll like heads.”  We are educated by this lifelong educator and uplifted by the voice of a lifelong poet. We feel the cool of hand-painted porcelain, and long fields of wheat with heavy heads. “Our professors prepared us,” she says, “by always using lazy/before peasants,” whom she observes hoeing, hoeing like this Midwestern rancher, herself, has hoed.  Garton anchors us in places with names, freeing us to canter into her art, where “sunflowers and Lipizzaners look away” and “Dark colts and light mares lift on hind legs.”

–Lisa D. Stewart, author of The Big Quiet—One Woman’s Horseback Ride Home (Meadowlark Books)

These Eastern European inspired poems are pouts of serious travels. Garton captures daily images and mannerisms well while exposing the thoughts and differences of cultures. These poems capture the details and images of life in Eastern Europe from an outsider’s perspective. Garton masterfully crafts her lines and metaphors. In Riding Moxie the Silver buttons on his vest / brighten an overcast day. She exposes the differences of attitudes where …serious hosts…./ are not yet attuned to the iron cage/ of happy, consuming Americans.

–Silvia Kofler, author of Gambol the World: Eine Weltanschauung, is editor of Thorny Locust.

Victoria Garton’s Pout of Tangerine Tango not only observes Eastern European daily life during a study-abroad summer in 1998, it brings American privilege and bias into clear focus and asks all of us to question what we think we know of ourselves and others.  In “The Cold War,” Garton, a life-long teacher, acknowledges the sometimes misguided ways education warps our sense of people we do not know:  “A girl in Civics class, I bent over books/ shaping enemies huge as their [Lenin, Marx] statues,” and “Fear tasted like canned peas/ simmering for lunch.” About the people with serious faces observed on Budapest streets, she sees the price of freedom:  “They are not yet attuned to the iron cage/ of happy, consuming Americans.”   About themselves, “American Teachers Going to Class,” she admits, “We’ll open a Starbucks here, /bring beans we like from the states.”  Rich as these poems are in the details of foreign travel, richer still are the questions raised about the people we Americans think we are.  This book is more timely now than ever.

–Janet Reed, author of Blue Exhaust:  Poems (Finishing Line Press).