Linger to Look

The last time I was able to attend the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman in the summer of 2015, I came home with a righteous stack of participant and instructor books.  Around my drumming, performing and writing schedule, I’ve been gradually reading my way through the stack. Today, with morning coffee, I enjoyed the intriguing full-length poetry collection by Sabne Raznik entitled Linger to Look. I’m sorry it took me so long to get to this unusual, yet cohesive collection.

The over-arching themes of Linger to Look seem to be desire, belonging, transformation, and loss. Many of the poems are spoken in the voice of a woman who longs to dance and break free from the bonds that tether her to dusty reality. Horse, bird, water, and stone images abound. Musical use of language led me to finally read many of the poems aloud to myself to further experience the poet’s skill with sound.

Interspersed throughout the collection are the poet’s sketches of belly dancers and expressionistic photographs by Jan McCullough.  These interludes of visual art weave the thematic threads of poignant lyric and narrative poems to the more experimental collage pieces like “possible: raha,” a 9-page romp into the abstract.

I was set to work looking up many of the poet’s allusions to belly dancing, quotes in Hebrew and Aramaic, and references to middle eastern culture.  While these brief forays into research did not affect my overall understanding of the poems, I would have appreciated a few footnotes on the more obscure references to musicians who play belly dancing music. But then, I might have missed listening to some of that fine music on youtube.

Linger to Look, published in 2015, by Sabne Raznik is a dance of musical language and metaphysical imagery, swirling in experimentation and shimmering in the jingling of human heart.

Next Door to the Dead--October Blog Binge

I have lived next door to a cemetery for the past 18 years.  When we first moved here, some of my friends and family shuddered at the thought. But my mom weighed in with the wisdom of Grandma Margaret who once said in her typical cynicism, “you have nothing to fear from those people. It’s the live ones you have to worry about.”

Poet, Kathleen Driskell, also lives next to a cemetery which she uses for inspiration in her new collection, Next Door to the Dead: Poems from University Press of Kentucky’s Kentucky Voices series, 2015. Driskell is associate editor of the Louisville Review and professor of creative writing at Spaulding University where she also helps direct the low-residency MFA in Writing program.  She is the author of numerous books and collections, including Laughing Sickness and Seed Across Snow.

The collection begins with an “Ars Poetica” section, which loosely defined, is a reason for writing. In it, she describes the cemetery before her and the effect it has on her creativity in these lines:

“…With this dark 

   nourishment,

imagination, my only god, lifts, takes wing.”

Part 1 contains poems about buzzards carrying away roadkill, funerals that invade the poet’s privacy even though the preacher assured her the cemetery was inactive, mowers who attend the graves, and some imagined back stories for specific grave markers. This section seems to be mostly about the day-to-day of the cemetery’s present.  One poem that resonated with my own experiences living next to a cemetery is entitled “What Haunts.”  Instead of ghosts, as the reader might suspect from the title, Driskell and her husband are beset by teenagers who feel some rite-of-passage obligation to hang around in dark, scary places in the middle of the night. Much of the imagery of this poem paints the invaders as ghostly with words like “float,” “haunts,”

“flitting through air,” “seeming to hang airborne.”  But from the beginning of the poem, Driskell also paints their swagger and life force as something very animal and dangerous. In lines like “the hands of a mob steady in pursuit of scent,” and “bared teeth,” she creates the kind of living being my grandma feared.

Part 2 begins again with the cemetery markers, but Driskell journeys farther afield into her contemplations about the dead. One poem takes us to the Irish Sea, another to the Aran Islands, and yet another to the Kentucky Science Center.  My favorite poem in this section is told in the persona of a mummy at the museum. She talks about her death, her status, how she ends up without a head because of the 1937 flood. Then comically, she relates how two boys reel in her head while fishing. Another poem in this section reveals how Dante Gabriel Rosetti buries love poems with his wife, later realizing that he never made copies.

Part 3 explores the graves of slaves, the marker of a snake handler who dies from snakebite, the contrast between markers for Colonel Sanders and his wife, and a melancholy persona poem about a stillborn child.  The poet also considers why some stones are so small and how that surely cannot indicate the soul’s true worth. A mathematician, still figuring from his grave, laments:

“…I’ve come to 

understand the slash of a grieving man walking

against the winter wind and the equal signs

that wagon wheels leave in the mud

when carrying an infant’s coffin.”

Part 4 takes on a contemplative tone, considering the nature of aging, death and dying. The poet considers the skull of a deer as she takes her daily walk through the woods. She also observes a man who chainsaws “orphan trees encroaching at the wild edges” of the cemetery. The poem, entitled “Clear Cut” describes the raw work of mourning one’s child. A set of persona poems tells the sad tale of domestic abuse. Old dogs and old people defy death. An empty grave mocks and beckons. Driskell closes her satisfying collection with a poem about birds flying in murmuration over the cemetery. As the flock alights on branches, this image emerges:

“…each branch

like a road leading to the heart

      of a town I had not known

I wished to visit.”

I enjoyed my visit Next Door to the Dead. You can find a link to Kathleen Driskell’s latest collection of poetry at WVXU.org

Blog Binge Continues with Poetry from Jeanne Bryner

Early Farming Woman—August/September

I first discovered Jeanne Bryner’s poetry in a compilation called Every River on Earth, a rich anthology of Appalachian writers from Ohio University Press. Her poems in that collection focused in close on the good people who work the land. In her recent chapbook from Finishing Line Press entitled Early Farming Woman, she again trains her poet’s eye and ear on those people, but the reader is teleported back to the earliest farmers in a time when young virgins are sacrificed for the harvest, a nomad woman must decide to abandon one child to save the rest of her brood, and violent raids are common to acquire or defend the best land. The images are brutal, yet beautiful, as the women of the poems braid communal bonds of sisterhood required to nurture life against the beginnings of war.

Many anthropologists believe that war—as we know it—did not exist as long as humans were hunter-gatherers. These scholars theorize that wars developed as humans began to claim territory for farming. The competition for fertile land gave rise to open conflict. In the expert sequencing of her poems, Bryner’s first poem “carves the moment:

quiet hummingbird, wren golden eagle,

the milk rising, the water running down.”

The reader moves from bucolic bliss of women bathing at water’s edge, one sister carving the image of the moment, to the first major conflict in the series of poems.  We journey through a land and time fraught with dangers and loyalties, heartbreak and joy.

I first read the 18 poems out of sequence, favoring titles I found intriguing.  While the poems stand alone quite well—and many of them were submitted as stand alone for previous publication in various journals—I really didn’t get the full effect of the chapbook’s artfulness until I read it in sequence. Bryner has mastered placing her poems in a way that surprises and shocks the reader with story. I think I audibly gasped a few times during my second reading at the horror or the anguish or the compassion of the speaker. 

All viewpoints within the chapbook are distinctly feminine. Whether it be the new mother bathing at the stream with her new baby, flanked by her mother, who is lovingly washing her daughter’s hair while a new generation suckles, and a sister who is documenting the beauty of the moment, her female relatives, and nature in a carving. Or whether it be a female lamb who is adopted as both a pet and a breeder by an early farming family. The lamb describes the heavy bonds of love in these haunting lines:

“…The children grew,

swinging clubs, pelting rocks, a sudden thud

I was blinded. Now if the great door stands open,

I don’t try to leave. Protection is milk,

and love a brand,

not nearly as gentle as it sounds.”

The title poem, placed nearly one-third of the way through the chapbook, “Early Farming Woman,” portrays a widow trying to fend for her family when she happens upon a dark-skinned man with a lamb slung over his shoulders. The widow considers her plight and the promise this chance meeting opens for her family in these lines:

“The man speaks and it is the sound

of morning birds. My children wave

to him, point to his lamb.

I am tired of dry seeds and praying

for the clouds to tell their story.

I’ve had my fill of beatings,

carrying the elders’ water in clay vessels.

Whatever this man wants, I will give him,

and my children will eat.”

In another poem entitled “Field Flower,” a woman nurtures her dead sister’s son, who is growing up with a gentle nature, not valued by the men of the tribe. The speaker expresses her love for the sweet boy and the fears she harbors for his fate:

“He pets and pets the babies, waters

elders and the sick, hides from storms.

His father? The other men?

They whip any dog that cannot run.

any boy that will not kill.”

In one of the most powerful poems from this chapbook, a character called “Gray Braid” describes how a warring tribe attacks her village, killing her grand daughter and her sister, leaving her near death, but surviving to tell the story:

“I am the shade 

of a tree with many circles

and when I am stronger

there will be much to tell.

I am my sister’s tongue.

I am my sister’s tongue.”

Jeanne Bryner is indeed her sister’s tongue, telling a tale of survival, love and perseverance for those whose tongues have been cut out for fighting back against a world of violence and fear. She is a nurse by profession and a poet by avocation whose poetry has been adapted for stage.

Her writing accolades include fellowships from Bucknell University, the Ohio Arts Council, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry collection Smoke:Poems received an American Journal of Nursing 2012 Book of the Year Award. She lives with her husband near a dairy farm in Newton Falls, Ohio. You can find a link to Early Farming Woman at WVXU.org/aroundcincinnati

Binge Blogging. In a World of Netflix and On-demand Movies, You Knew it Was Coming.

This morning, I woke up feeling extra tired. Sometimes, I can’t place the source of my fatigue. Then, I decided this morning would be a good time to round up all the books I’ve reviewed since May in order to post the reviews on this blog.  Now, I think I know at least one source of the tired.  These books have been my teachers for the past five months. I have quoted them in discussions, used them to understand what it’s like to be a refugee, learned new words from them like “hagiography,” gained new insight into the early roots of democracy, and flat out enjoyed some really good poetry in the process. So, it is with great pleasure that I post these reviews which originally aired on Around Cincinnati, a fine cultural radio program produced by my longtime friend, Lee Hay(who is probably way more tired than I am for her weekly dedication to producing fine programming for the Greater Cincinnati arts community.)  The show airs each Sunday evening at 7 pm.  I will post audio links with my reviews so that you can see what else WVXU.org offers our community each and every day.

Medic Against Bomb—June, 2015

I once told my high school American Literature students that The Red Badge of Courage was all I ever needed to know about the Civil War. And yet, Stephen Crane wasn't even born during that war and had not yet experienced battle when he wrote his realistic account.  Some sources indicate that he pieced together his heart-wrenching narrative from talking to war veterans and from examining news articles written during war time.

Frederick Foote did not have to look far for his accounts of battle and its aftermath in Medic Against Bomb: a Doctor's Poetry of War.  He was there, piecing together the wounded and grieving for the dead.  His 2014 collection from Grayson Books is the 2013 winner of the Grayson Books Poetry Prize and draws this praise from North Carolina's former Poet Laureate, Joseph Bathanti who says:

"These are tough poems, yet imbued with a beauty borne of truth that one can't turn away from…These poems are crucial. These poems are Requiem."

In the first section of Medic Against Bomb entitled "Contact," there are poems about wounded Iraqi soldiers, wounded American soldiers,  the nurses and the doctors, innocent civilian victims , and the press.  I noticed on reading this section, that Foote often used some form or rhyme, almost to make sense of the suddenly blind civilian, or the soldier missing limbs, or the special needs child thrown onto the medical helicopter to rid his family of the burden for his care. Most of the poems here are told from the medic's point of view as he tries to make sense of the senseless.  I would like to share part of a beautiful poem entitled "You Gave the Iraqis Their Scarves, for Doctor Pat McKay.

"you'd find a place

no one could observe

bring out an ancient

Singer sewing Machine

and squares of silk

left over from a quilt

the nurses made

to celebrate our work

And there each night

like the breath of a word

You'd sew, quietly sew.."

In the second section entitled "Battle Fugue," the poems abandon most conventions, favoring the hard-packed density of words associated with the battle experience in Irag and the medic's struggle to put the wounded back together. Medical instruments are juxtaposed with military equipment in lines that almost demand to be barked through clenched teeth.

Here is an example from the poem, "Corpsman."

"reaches under Kevlar to augur the dawning

flange no wider than fingers torn flesh thin door

flash back to times of homely diarrhea

pack him like you never packed before

clipping with Kellys abdominal chitlins

pushing trach oncounter Marine boots still on

Sam stick with me Sam…"

Foote provides notes at the end of the volume for those not acquainted with medical and military jargon.  He explains the "Kellys" as surgical clamps and the "trach" as an abbreviation for the tracheotomy, a procedure for cutting open the wind pipe to ease breathing.  I used the glossary after reading all the poems to get a deeper understanding.  Although all of them were comprehensible to me without the explanations, I like to fully understand.

The third section of the book is called "The Ruins of Peace" and deals mainly with the after effects of war on a country, the soldiers, and the medical teams. Those effects often last for years, or may never go away.  One poem, "Blood Brothers," paints a picture of enemies who died together:

"The flight swirled down from the roof

where the troops went in

and somehow, amid confusion

and acrid haze,

these two fell down

together: a beardless Marine

poured out on a Mujahadeen

killed by grenades."

Foote calls his final section "Coda."  It contains one small poem that I will read in its entirety.

"The Gunner John

Pity him here, his skull crushed by a tread--

beneath the mud pressed out, one intact jaw.

some teeth at ninety degrees, the scraps of a tongue--

Was he no more that this? No this was a mask,

place it in calm beneath the ground,

and when he takes it off, he'll still be whole."

Frederick Foote is a retired U.S. Navy physician who lives in Bethesda, Maryland. He is the director of Warrior Poetry Project at Walter Reed National Medical Center.  A portion of proceeds from his book, Medic Against Bomb: a Doctor's Poetry of War goes to the Green Road Project for Wounded Warriors. You can find a link to this book at wvxu.org/aroundcincinnati

The Seed of Me

Since poet, Karen George dedicates her latest chapbook of poems to her grandmother and mother, and since a photo of a mother and bride adorn the cover, reflected in the intimacy of a dresser mirror, I was prepared to read this group of poems as personal intergenerational legacy.  What I was not prepared for was how completely a poet's craft can transform the personal into the magical and universal. 

The Seed of Me, 2015, from Finishing Line Press is George's third chapbook. She is also the author of another title from Finishing Line, Into the Heartland,  2011 and Inner Passage, 2014, from Red Bird Chapbooks. Her first full collection, Swim Your Way Back was published by Dos Madres Press in 2014. 

I read The Seed of Me expecting a tribute to the poet's mother and grandmother for nurturing a creative spirit. Instead, I read about light bodies, broken dolls, missing spleens, birthmarks, motorcycle rides, bowling balls, and the dead among the living.  I read about blisters and  visions.  I read about the moon.

One of my favorites from this chapbook is "The Moon After a Poetry Jam." I love it for its musical language and magical  image. Here are just a few lines to let you know what I mean:

"Over the main road the moon hangs low, pregnant with rise,

and I unmoor to meet her in inky air. Down the winding

hill she hides behind tree clumps of humid-heavy leaves,

her glow a halo luminous above the crowns."

Another poem awash in magic imagery is entitled "Transformations, the Suspension Bridge."  In it, the poet recalls driving from Kentucky to Ohio over the Suspension Bridge on the day her grandma died:

"Parallel strings of light

transposed

to strands of DNA, pulsing.

Streetlamps flared,

floated from their posts,

drew together like magnets.

When the current entered,

I no longer heard

tires from the bridge,

felt the wheel vibrate,

smelled winter or river.

The moment peeled

forward, into place,

and lamps returned

to their posts

and subdued states."

In several poems,  the speaker engages with something beyond everyday experience--a current that both transcends and transforms time.

The poet recognizes her sensory connection to the extraordinary early in her life and describes her experience in the poem from which she draws her chapbook's title.  The poem is "The Dead Live at Hemlock Lodge, Natural Bridge, Kentucky."

"The first time  I felt the dead   among the living.  I was ten, on a 

family vacation.   The dining room air   dusk-heavy, as though we

trudged through waist-high water.   The dark wood of tables, chairs,

wall and ceiling beams   dimmed the midday light from the bank of

windows.  I neither saw nor heard the passed, only felt their current,

a pool.   No fear or torment, more like the salve of walking in woods

among tunneling insects   and roots.   I knew not to tell, as I knew

not to question   the nuns in school.   To keep beliefs and doubts

hidden.  I studied my parents' and sisters' faces, and buried the secret

in my soul. Not the place they said sin tarnished, but where the seed 

of me   burrowed, thinned, and branched."

The Seed of Me honors both George's mother and her grandmother through stunning universal imagery that connects even the most personal family story to the cosmic current.

This review aired in April 2015 on AROUND CINCINNATI, WVXU.org.  There were a few extra sentences about a then upcoming event for the poet that has already passed.  If you'd like to listen while reading, here is a link.

Every River on Earth

I read many compilations by and about Appalachians. But seldom have I read a collection so rooted in place as Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio published earlier this year by Ohio University Press. Edited skillfully by poet Neil Carpathios, the coordinator of the creative writing program at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, this intriguing collection is divided into four parts that speak to the paradox of Appalachian experience as defined in southern Ohio.

Carpathios acknowledges his "transplant" status in the introduction to the book's themes,"…this anthology started with a personal, maybe even somewhat selfish desire to better grasp my new home," he says.  Winnowing the 400 plus submissions down by the primary criterion of "quality," Carpathios sought to include a variety of styles, subjects and voices that he says took on a life of their own, falling organically into four sections:  "Family and Folks," "The Land," "The Grind," and "Home and Away."

The book takes its title from David Lee Garrison's poem which includes this lyric tribute to the land:

"Wind pokes the land in winter,

trying to waken it,

and in the melting snow 

I see rainbows and in them

every river on earth."

Donald Ray Pollock provides the longtime resident's perspective in his foreword to the anthology when he says, "no, I can't think of anywhere I'd rather live."  Even though he admits  his life in Knockemstiff has included factory work, hard living and eventually an alcohol and drug rehab, he asserts that while there is "ugliness and despair and heartbreak in these hills, there is also much goodness and mystery and beauty."  Later in the anthology, the reader is treated to the beauty that Pollock makes of heartbreak in his story of forgiveness, "The Jesus Lights."

In the opening section, "Family and Folks," I was instantly charmed with the poetic voice employed by Roy Bentley, with Jeanne Bryner's stunning imagery when describing her farmer neighbor at work, and by the sense of magic in poet, Cathryn Essinger's "The Way Things Are." Ed Davis takes a surprising offer from a desperate widower to create "a boiling Appalachian stew" from his novel-in-progress. And I am still giggling from Janet Ladrach's "The Farmer's Wife's Vacation."

The second section includes homage to the landscape of southern Ohio including two of my new favorite tributes to sycamores by Cathryn Essinger and Richard Hague. Essinger entitles her poem "Someday the sycamores…" and in her playful lines, supposes that someday these trees are simply going to walk away in reaction to an ever-hovering danger from development.  She closes her poem with these  lines:

"And if you watch carefully, if you sit down in the dark

when the moon, that old tattletale, is out of sight,

you will see them stand

on gnarled knuckles and inch away, see them gather up 

their children, hand in hand, and even if you call,

they will not come back."

Richard Hague is a Cincinnatian who has published 14 books, many that are set in eastern and southern Ohio. In his nonfiction contribution, he describes how easy it is to forget that we live in a natural world when the city swallows so much of it. Hague relates the sycamore hunts he and his late friend, Joe Enzweiler used to plan together. He also crafts many indelible descriptions of the trees:

"The sycamores edged the stream like a procession of white-robed deacons."

The third section of the book is entitled "The Grind."  It is here that we read about the difficulties of living in Appalachian Ohio.  Those ugly, desperate heartbreaks that Donald Ray Pollock warns us about in his foreword.  Among my favorite reads from this section--which was heavier on prose than the other sections--are Michael Henson's "Coming Home," "Destroying New Boston" by Brooks Rexroat and of course, "The Jesus Lights" by Donald Ray Pollock. In these raw stories, a recovering addict gets thrown right back into the path of cronies who will surely drive her to drugs, a bunch of bored teenagers accidentally wreck part of a town's painful heritage, and a man's grief illuminates a path for forgiveness.  While the circumstances in many of these tales are bleak, the characters are not. Many of them discover "the goodness and the mystery and the beauty" in their plights.

The final section, entitled "Home and Away" is largely devoted to those looking back at southern Ohio from somewhere else.  Whether it be Los Angeles, New Orleans or a fourteenth floor apartment, the characters and speakers look back homeward over time and distance.  My favorites from this section include Ronald D.Giles' "The Friday Night Dance," and Hayley Hughes' "The Fair."  Both are personal stories, but from very different time periods. Giles writes of an eighth grade dance experience in the 1950s while Hughes shares her more recent adventures at the Ohio State Fair with her father-- from her earliest recollections to her twenty-sixth year.  While Giles' maintains a strict narrative timeline, Hughes bounces around her quirky personal essay revealing the tricky relationship she maintains with home and family.  I also enjoyed the found poem in this section entitled "Portrait of Southern Ohio in Five-Syllable Road Signs" by Adam Sol.

While Every River on Earth laments the ugliness, despair and heartbreak of Appalachian Ohio. its quality of writing is testament to the goodness, mystery and beauty rising from a deep sense of place. Several of the authors have a reading scheduled at Joseph-Beth Cincinnati on April 4th at 2 pm.  You just might want to be there if you enjoy masterful writing or a great yarn.

This review originally aired on WVXU.org's AROUND CINCINNATI on March 27, 2015.  You can listen to the review at this link:  Listen to this review.

Many Storied House

In Many-Storied House, George Ella Lyon's latest poetry collection from University Press of Kentucky, the poet uses her own "floor plan" prompt as the organizing device for this volume of inviting poems. The effect is magical. Poet, Naomi Shihab Nye agrees, as she offers this praise for the back cover, "George Ella Lyon writes the most transporting, intuitive, inviting poems, their doors feel wide open." And North Carolina's Poet Laureate, Joseph Bathanti offers his tribute to Lyon's craft with this comment, "Each room, each curio, each haunted nail and joist is cataloged, named and invested with chiseled language."

George Ella Lyon, is an award-winning author of books for readers of all ages. I first became acquainted with her work when I taught high school English and my friend Lee Howard came to do a writing residency with my sophomores. She shared with me a prompt from George Ella that began with "I am from…"  For the first time, my students were able to produce stories about themselves rich in personal memories of place. In subsequent writing workshops, I ran into other prompts generated by George Ella until I was finally lucky enough to attend a workshop at Grailville taught by the poet herself.

In that workshop, the participants all drew floor plans of a childhood home, labeling the rooms and listing memories of important events that occurred in each room. From one of these diagrams and a later songwriting prompt, I was eventually able to write a song about a family story my Grandma Babe told me about her father. The diagram enabled me to fill the story with sensory details from Grandma's house, including a stern portrait of my grandpa and the praying hands of Jesus, a print my Grandma had encased in a lighted frame over her bed, The portrait and the print became witnesses to Grandma's story.

George Ella Lyon uses the floor plans of Many-Storied House to move the reader through the space by story, metaphorical and actual. We begin our journey at the entry of the first floor, and work our way through the various rooms, basement and garage before confronting a new story entitled "Flood."  From "Flood," the reader moves to "Upstairs,"  to "Yard," and finally to "All of It,"  a section that seems to challenge the poet to stand apart from the house, to take it in as a whole. I really enjoyed meeting the inhabitants of this house through their many stories, out of timeline.  By arranging the poems in the way that memory works--jumping our way through related synapses, following the firing neurons --Lyon brings us into her world. We feel these people and their stories rather than perceive them.

In a poem called "Smithereens,"  Lyon shares her first inkling about the power of the atom to destroy.  The poem is part of the "Upstairs" section, where revelations about life and her family seem to appear to the poet. While watching the president on TV in the library, Lyon recalls a science lesson:

On the dusty blackboard last year

Mr. Smith looped the invisible 

solar system of the atom. "The

energy that holds everything together

can be reversed." he said. "And blow it all

apart."

Near the end of the poem, the 8th grader posits her understanding of the way things work:

…This is what 

the world is.  Great forces must stick to

their orbits or unleash the rush that will

blow us all to smithereens.

In another revelation on the upstairs level, a young girl tries to tell her mother that something bad happened to her at the neighbor's house. Her mother continues to sort laundry and responds.

You know that's not true

she says.

These are our neighbors

These are our friends

Nothing happened

The next few poems on that story follow the neural trace of fear for that young girl. Fear of the linen closet, fear of going to the neighbor's again, and fear of the kind of "doll mother" the young girl has become.  Then, the shame of not knowing about menstruation and where that synapse takes her: to her brother's room and the smells of boys and the ways it is off limits.

Because my own memories jump leap frog fashion across lily pads of category, I find Lyon's organization of her amazing collection of poems accessible and completely without judgment. The family in the many-storied house is revealed to us with all its faults.  Human, exposed and loved outright.

In one poem, she wonders how her mother can keep the criticizing image of the poet's grandma so near to her through her life.

Why she faces 

that face

every morning

I cannot comprehend

unless it's to say

Even you

could not

stop me

In a poem entitled "With a Song in His Heart," Lyon pays tribute to her departed father with their shared love of music.  I can barely read this poem without crying, but the final lines say it all:

"O Daddy, I am leaning

on those everlasting arms."

Many-Storied House is a master work from George Ella Lyon.  She wields her own teaching tool of the floor plan with the craft of an architect.

***This review aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati in October, 2013.  You can listen to it here.

Appalachian Elegy

"Poetry is a useful place for lamentation," says author, activist, teacher, and artist, bell hooks in the introduction to her latest work, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place. Published in late September of 2012 by University Press of Kentucky, this volume of meditative poetry is a departure for hooks who has written more than 30 books in her career, mostly provocative and political writings on gender, social justice, sustainability, and literary criticism. Why then these sixty-six poems of mourning and celebration for the land of her birth?

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1952, hooks took her lower case pen name from her grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, a strong-willed African American woman who urged Gloria to take a stand against the repressive forces of the dominant society. After the adversities she faced transitioning to a predominately white high school during the turbulent 1960s, bell hooks pursued her degrees in English, education and literature at Stanford, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, writing her doctoral dissertation on author, Toni Morrison.

In 2004, hooks accepted a position in the department of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, bringing her back to her Kentucky roots. Since her return, the concept of community and its ability to overcome race, class, and gender inequalities has become more prevalent in her writings. As hooks says in the introduction to her poems, "living in the Kentucky hills was where I first learned the importance of being wild."  She goes on to say that this wildness led her to believe in the power of the individual to be self-determining. hooks sums up the influence of her Kentucky childhood on her radical critical consciousness in the following passage,  "Folks from the backwoods were certain about two things:  that every human soul needed to be free and that the responsibility for being free required one to be a person of integrity, a person who lived in such a way that there would always be congruency between what one thinks, says and does."

The poems of this collection are largely about reconnecting with place, sometimes causing the poet to alternately mourn and celebrate the beauty of the land, animals and people who have formed her. The lines are short, lyrical and unpunctuated, giving the reader a frozen snapshot of a natural world partially destroyed that will not be conquered. There are no titles, but numbers for each piece, and each poem seems to be organized around a single evocative image.  The second poem addresses the loss of a beautiful landscape in the following excerpt:

such then is beauty

surrendered

against all hope

you are here again

turning slowly

nature as chameleon

all life change

and changing again

awakening hearts

steady moving from

unnamed loss

into fierce deep grief…

And then poem 7 discusses hooks' ancestral ties to the land and her inner wildness  in these lines:

again and again

she calls me

this wilderness within

urging me onward

be here

make a path

where the sound

of ancestors speak

a language heard beyond the grave…

Poem 21 speaks of turtles and a land without environmental devastation:

turtle islands everywhere

heads poking out

bodies embraced in the world

before the coming of the white man…

hooks conjures a time before horse racing and farms in these final lines from poem 26

horses grazing quietly

four-legged Buddhas

standing in grace

forgiving

There are poems about drought, mudslides, fires, fallen trees, soaring birds, mammoth caves, native peoples, storms, a strutting turkey, and ravaged mountain landscapes--all infused with deep sadness and hope.

bell hooks had never really identified as an Appalachian, but acknowledges in this beautiful collection her claim of " a solidarity, a sense of belonging that makes me one with the Appalachian past of my ancestors: black, Native American, white, all 'people of one blood' who made homeplace in isolated landscapes where they could invent themselves, where they could savor a taste of freedom."

In poem 55 hooks seems to embrace that sense of belonging:

take the

hand-me-downs

make do

no culture of poverty

claiming lives here

we a people of plenty

back then

work hard

know no hunger

grow food

sew clothing

build shelter

moonshine still

wine from grape

we a marooned

mountain people

backwoods souls

we know how to live on little

to make a simple life

away from manmade

laws and boundaries

spirit guides teach us

offer always 

the promise

of an eternal now

Contemplating the woodland palette of bell hooks' Appalachian Elegy,  with its short meditative lines, plain language, and stark imagery,  allows the reader to consider the grief and healing of these lamentations mindfully, in the "eternal now" of the heart.

This review aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati program in December 2012.

Listen to the review here.

A is for Appalachia and What Comes Down to Us

Two titles from University Press of Kentucky light the way toward better understanding of a culture and a craft. A is for Appalachia!,written by Linda Hager Pack and illustrated by Pat Banks, lifts a lamp to the history, geography, and culture of the collaborators’ beloved heritage. In What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, Jeff Worley spotlights the diversity and vitality of modern verse in the Commonwealth. Both books enlighten in their method of presentation and rich content.

I chose to pick up the children’s book first, of course. Drawn in by the marvelous cover art by master water colorist and Kentucky Arts Council Roster Artist, Pat Banks, I couldn’t wait to see why novelist Silas House declared this book “the perfect read.” Could it be because in his recent blog, A Country Boy Can Surmise, he had declared “Appalachia” to be the perfect word in that the letters seem to depict the rising and falling mountainscape with a little moon dotting the “i”?

Or could it be the perfect read because it is organized like an old-time children’s reader for teaching the alphabet by presenting a word and a picture for each new letter to aid the pupil’s comprehension?

My reading lesson on Appalachia began with the letter “A” which is for “Appalachia,” a region and culture defined by Pack in her text along side a breathtaking mountain vista created by Banks. The effect is stunning: here’s what the place encompasses, now witness it’s beauty and essence.

My lesson continued with some predictable forays into the letters “B” and “C” for “baskets” and “coal.” Since I was already well-schooled in some aspects of Appalachia, I expected these lessons. But I was completely surprised and delighted by the honest dichotomy between churchgoing ways and joy of living presented in the letter “D.” Pack handles that divide in her wry commentary on the dulcimer and fiddle as she advises the “youngin’s” not to view “the devil’s box” boldly explained and illustrated on the page before them.

Another interesting lesson is “J” is for “Jack Tale” which includes a text version of the tale superimposed on a beanstalk illustration that rivals the beauty of any fairy tale book I knew as a child. Well-presented also are “N” is for “Native Appalachians” supported by the clever inclusion of the Cherokee alphabet and “Y” is for “Yarb doctor” emphasizing the healing role herbs and plants play in the remote mountain regions.

Pack teaches children’s literature at Eastern Kentucky University, so it is easy to see how this book could be used by teachers to springboard a unit on Appalachia. But more importantly, Silas House was right. This is the perfect read to share with those you love.

Presenting poets chronologically is common in anthologies; however, Jeff Worley, a poet and professor himself, sheds light on the poetic process by following each set of poems in What Comes Down to Us with a brief biography and the poet’s commentary on the sometimes mystical matter of craft. The effect on me as a reader was surprising. Normally I would want to skim through a book like this reading the people I know about, saving the new folks for later. Instead, I found the format of first, writer’s face and birth date,then, selected poems, then, biography,and finally,reflections on craft and influences tantalizing enough not to “jump the order.” It was almost as if the title and format enforced a cosmic flow leading “down to us,” as the title suggests. By the end, I felt I had witnessed a stellar poetry reading with mini-workshop, all under my humble living room lamp.

The subjects for this over 100-poem collection include joy, death, family relations, and Kentucky history. It would be hard to pick favorites amid the exquisite verse, but I will share a few hard-to-shake glimpses.

I was smacked in the face by the imagery in Wendell Berry’s “The Man Born to Farming.”

Instructed in the mystery of all craft by Richard Taylor’s “Notes for a Manual on Form.”

Appreciated the importance of who’s telling the tale in Frank X Walker’s “Revisionist History.”

Experienced the power of a “made thing” -- like a poem that can distill emotions from disparate experiences-- with Leatha Kendrick in “Refusing a Spinal.”

Wondered with Frederick Smock about Cassius Clay’s gold medal at the bottom of the Ohio River.

Read the skies and predicted a moon landing with Nikky Finney’s “Black Orion.”

Laughed uneasily and inevitably at an outdoor wedding gone wrong with Kathleen Driskell.

This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in the scope and craft of contemporary poetry. What Comes Down to Us affirms Kentucky’s place in the literary landscape while shining a light on the poetic process itself.

This review first aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati with award-winning host, Lee Hay. An audio link is included at the bottom of this blog.