For me the two highlights of Roy Scheele’s collection, Produce Wagon, and the language’s precision and its musicality, particularly the latter. Scheele makes use of a lot of internal and near rhyme, a lot of consonance and assonance, delighting the mind and ear.

Here, for example, is the end of “Flowering Crab”: “persiflage, camouflage, bunting, the blur of the oriole in the upper branches.” You can see (hear) that near rhyme at the start, the alliteration of bunting/blur/branches, the consonance of the repeated “r” sound in blur/oriole/branches.

In “Noticing,” an aptly titled work for a poet who is so minutely aware of the world around him, he describes the skin of an apple falling from where it’s being peeled: "with a shimmer of rose where the blade in its turn cuts close, a blush, called out of hiding like a second skin.” Again, the reader is drawn forward by the musicality of all the utilized sound elements: the soft “I” of shimmer/in/its/skin; the “c” sound in cuts/close/second/skin. The hard rhyme of rose and close, the partial rhyme of shimmer and turn, the alliteration of blade/blush.

On a walk (so many of the poems involve a walk outdoors), the person being addressed is
crossing to climb on the other side
Beyond the campers’ blue nylon tents
Pegged out like patches of fallen sky
And the lesser falls like a spillway
Out from under a bridge of ties,
The climb becoming much steeper now, ringed in
By trees, the way worn out
Of the chalky, porous soil, the bark
Of a birch branch lying in tatters
Below a pool, light reaching down
Through leaves to sway above the gravel

The segment is filled with:
rhymes and near -rhymes — climb/side/nylon/like/sky/ties/climb/lying/light

repeated sounds — pegged and patches, way and worn (rhymed with porous), bark and branch, steeper and trees and so many more.

The book is filled with a richness of sound and melody, of enticing echoes. It’s also filled, as the aforementioned “Noticing” highlights, with a voice, and more significantly, an eye and ear, that is hyper-attuned to the world. The language is always precise and vivid, not a “tree” but a “birch”, not a bird but a “robin”, not a “fish” but a “catfish” and on the litany goes, an inventory of nature’s variety. It’s a mind that takes joy in the everyday miracle of that variety and honors it with the specificity of language it deserves. It’s a mind that tells us to take joy in “the morning that never was before,” which after all, is every morning. Because doing so “is the way we take ourselves/on waking into what we are;/the high blue sky without a cloud, whatever it is that/calls to us, out of our own astonishment.”

Nor does Scheele ignore the human world, for the collection is peppered with lovely poems to his wife, poems with mothers and fathers and neighbors. A number of the more human centered poems are narrative, including a short cycle about a set of brutal deaths. But Scheele shows a variety of style and structure throughout, not just with the human focused works. A few of the poems are more formalized in structure, some are more prose poem than pure poem, some run to several pages, others a mere handful of lines. All in all, it’s a strong collection, centered in the Midwest but universal in its depictions of nature and people, and filled, as noted, but a wonderful symphony of sound.

This poetry collection was very medium for me, as an experience. There are some very beautiful poems about nature - the one about snow I read three times. His longer poems I generally didn't care for. They felt like prose pieces that had been cut up into even stanza lines. I'm on the fence about whether I'm glad I read the collection or not. I will be finding some of his nature poems to share with friends, but I don't think I would recommend the collection as a whole. Not that there's anything wrong with Scheele, necessarily, I'm just more interested in poetry as a political or emotional tool, than a descriptive one.

As a side note: the introduction at the beginning, by Ted Kooser, is very condescending & snobbish, which I did not appreciate. If I am reading him correctly, he does not believe modern day poets have a good sense of the sound of words, which is an over-simplification, one, and two, not always true. I don't think it was a fair way to introduce Scheele's work, personally.

A collection of poems throughout the author's life, Produce Wagon blends personal poems regarding his life, his losses, his memories, with nature themes.

I personally found these poems to be quite moving. The flow of his work was beautiful; poems dealing with his life easily transported the reader due to the use of ones senses.

The nature poems, I confess, were my favorite. Each one made me feel as though I were standing in Nebraska woods in an Autumn sunset.

In conclusion, this collection is an excellent piece for those who enjoy poetry.

Produce Wagons is a selection of poems that bring the universality of the human experience to the reader through the lens of the poet’s own life. Reading Produce Wagons felt like reliving memories with an old friend. The juxtaposition on nature and everyday moments made Scheele’s poetry relatable and nostalgic all at once.