Review
Original Review Date: 10/13/2008
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Title: Goodbye to Poplarhaven: Recollections of a Utah Boyhood
Author: Edward A. Geary
Illustrator: Ralph H. Reynolds
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Genre: Memoir
Year Published: 1985
Number of Pages: 163
Format(s) Available: Trade Paperback
ISBN: 13: 978-0874802498
ISBN: 10: 0874802490
Reviewed by Jonathan Langford for the Association for Mormon Letters
Review date: 10/13/2008
Memoirs are an exercise in nostalgia, at least the ones I tend to like most. The best of them, while they may be sentimental in a technical sense, are also surprisingly honest, combining a keen eye and memory for detail with quiet humor, like the love of someone who sees his or her partner’s follies and can tell them without rage or apology, simply as part of the person he or she loves.
Goodbye to Poplarhaven, by Ed Geary, represents one of the best of this genre that I have ever encountered. If you want a book that can bring rural Utah of the 1940s and 1950s to sympathetic life, even for someone like myself who grew up in green western Oregon suburbs instead of dry Utah country towns, this is your book.
Poplarhaven, as Geary explains in an Author’s Note, is his name for the actual town of Huntington during the period of his growing up: intended, as he puts it, “not to conceal a reality but to reflect my awareness that the place as I experienced and remember it will inevitably be different in some respects from the place that others have known.”
Geary’s style is quiet, understated even, but highly effective. His writing is studded with well-told details, his diction is precise, and his voice is the fluent one of a thoughtful man looking back on the scenes of his growing up with insight and a (sometimes rueful) affection. Here’s an example, chosen at random:
“The old Dodge, the threshing machine, and the steam engine were all casualties of the Second World War, gathered up, to my great regret, in the scrap iron drive of 1942-1943. But even after these losses, I lived on in a scavenger’s paradise. There were always interesting things to be found at the town dump up on Rowley Flat. […] The dead animals made for some olfactory unpleasantness, but otherwise the dump was a sensory delight, with shards of broken glass glittering like jewels in the sunlight and an inexhaustible variety of shapes: washtubs, bathtubs, cookstoves, wagon wheels, broken baby buggies and tricycles, and a brass bucket discarded for no apparent reason except a small hole in the bottom. There were the sounds of wind whistling across the chimney hole of an old stove and of all the thumps and thunks and plinks that rewarded the throwing of a rock, and a wonderful range of tactile sensations as well, from the gritty texture of rust on an old dishpan to the smoothness of a lump of melted glass dug out of the ashes. Surely Wallace Stegner was right when he observed, of another small-town refuse pile, ‘The dump was our poetry and our history.’“
Geary’s chapter titles give a nice sense of the range and focus of his topics:
- Disorder and Early Joy
- The Town on the Prickly Pear Flat
- Water in the Ditch
- Grandpa’s Place
- Memorable Conflagrations of My Early Years
- Hying to Kolob
- Why I Believe in Santa Claus
- Winter Chores
- The Only Game in Town
- Spring
- Haying
- Three Cheers
- Going Back to School
- The Girls Across the Valley
- The Mill
- Harvest Home
- Roundup
- Politics
- The Girl Who Danced with Butch Cassidy
- The Ward Teacher
- A Season on the Mountain
- The Farther Field
- Goodbye to Poplarhaven
Most of these were originally published in different form in either the Deseret News or Dialogue. Despite that, the essays work together well as a unified whole, with no unnecessary repetition or patchy seams from the stitching-together that I could tell.
One of the years I was teaching as a graduate student at BYU, Goodbye to Poplarhaven was used as one of the texts for freshman composition. The book proved surprisingly approachable for 18-year-olds—which may be a testimony to how little rural Utah has changed in some ways, but also speaks to Geary’s approachable style and his success at conjuring up the universals of childhood and adolescence in the ghost of his own particular experience.
The book reviewer’s task also calls for some mention of the lineart illustrations, which are, in a word, perfect. They capture the spirit of the book entirely. Sadly, I can’t recommend the book’s binding: my copy is frankly falling to pieces, and after I’m done with this review I plan to place it in a ziploc bag to keep it all together. Or maybe I’ll see if my wife Laurel’s trick of ironing the spine to remelt the glue will work.
The book ends with the death of the Poplarhaven Geary knew growing up, even while the town of Huntingon and surrounding communities expanded with the energy boom of the 1970s. Geary’s essays represent a tribute to that time now past.
Sadly, works of Mormon literature—even the good ones, like this—are even more ephemeral than marginal Utah farming towns. The book’s out of print, and when I called Ed Geary he said there aren’t any plans to reissue it. So probably your best bet is to look for used copies on the Internet, or search used bookstores in and around Utah Valley. After all, there should still be all those copies floating around from the year we used this for freshman composition.
My advice? Get hold of a copy. And if you happen to be a small Mormon or Western press interested in reprinting oldies-but-goodies, give this book a look. You won’t be sorry you did.