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| Book Reviews |
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| "Mouth Music" by Dudley Laufman reviewed by Patricia L. Frisella Tis a gift to be simple/Tis a gift to be free* Dudley Laufman's musical career began in 1947 when he called his first barn dance; by 1960 his Canterbury Dance Orchestra was known throughout the state. Today, he and his partner, Jacqueline, known together as Two Fiddles, average 200 gigs a year. The lives of these Canterbury residents could be considered archaic and quaint; they are "granolas," growing vegetables and living in a home with wood heat and without running water. Dudley, recipient of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts 2001 Folk Heritage Award, arrived in the state from Massachusetts in 1945. He worked on a dairy farm where his farm boss was a fiddler and the boss's wife a piano player. They held dances in their home for family and neighbors and the feeling of community evoked still clings to and haunts Dudley, and seeps into his poetry. Jim Collins, editor of Yankee Magazine, in "Who Still Follows the Pied Piper of Canterbury?" (December 1995), describes the early Dudley: "He was gruff and headstrong, but he wore his hair long, wore caps and capes and turtlenecks, and wrote poetry." An impassioned and charismatic caller, Dudley has attracted a wide range of converts to country dancing, but he is a traditionalist who has powerful notions about how dancing should be done and how dance tunes should be played. Simplicity of form is important to him. Those well grounded in Dudley's traditions hanker for livelier tunes and more complex dances, ready to move on, to grow out of the medium.They are leaving him and his music behind. Traditions can only be maintained by enthusiasts - they simply are not "worthwhile" to anyone else. Dudley's devotion has resulted in a renaissance of interest in all aspects of his music, and his lifelong passion influences his poetry. One of Dudley's poems, "Any Fruit Is Sweeter when Ripe" from "An Orchard & A Garden" (William L. Bauhan, 1974), was reprinted in "Silver Syllables," an anthology published by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire in 1989. The poem is stark and direct. His poems in "Mouth Music" (Wind in the Timothy Books, 2001) show little change; they are reminiscent of stone walls or Fall's well-organized rows of corn stubble, delicate and bare but with a sturdy form, such as this haiku: Whistling hornpipes Milking machines pulsate slow Can't wait for the dance. Although Dudley is a musician, a fiddler and button accordion player, his poems seem quiet. These are not wild Cape Breton tunes he is conjuring up but those that belonged to staid American Colonists. Some of his poems are romantic in a way that is hard for many to even imagine, such as these lines from the prose poem, "Two Fiddles." He says of a pair of fiddles: At night tending the wood stove, I hear the two of them talking. I'm going to get a double fiddle case so they can sleep together. Some of the poems rhyme, but the forms and language are plain and direct. There are occasional shards of ironic humor, which can easily be missed without some knowledge of Dudley's feelings about his music. For example, in "I Hope this is a Real Contra Dance," he pokes fun at modern-day dancers who smell of after shave and patchouli rather than of hay, talcum and sweat and for whom this type of dance is just an alternative to the movies. The book has some of the flaws typical of self-published work - typographical errors, odd spellings and punctuation, and some passages in an almost incomprehensible French - but these faults are easily forgiven. Overall, there is a naïve longing beneath the lines for a simpler time. No new ground is broken in this book, but that is just the way Dudely would want it. * lines from an 18th-century Shaker hymn "Flash!Point" (Fall 2001, Issue No. 5), Frances LeMoine, publisher reviewed by Patrick Meighan |