This is how Rob Neufeld's review of the recently published Southern Appalachian Poetry anthology begins in the Asheville Citizen Times today:
M any of the poets in "Southern Appalachian Poetry," Marita Garin's new anthology, talk like ghosts. Their laments and longings view life as if from under a TVA lake. This is mostly by design; for Garin, poet and Elderhostel instructor, set out to "document and preserve details of a way of life in the Southern Appalachian region that is beginning to disappear."
Marita, herself a splendid poet, explains in her introduction that this book was begun well over a decade ago. Its original title was FROM BLOODROOT TO SUMMIT, a wonderful turn of phrase and imagery. I wish she could have kept it, and I wish now that I had stolen it for one of my own books! The poems of mine in the anthology are from my second collection, Wildwood Flower. I've moved on since then, but I don't really think of the voice of Alma as sounding like a ghost's voice. The reason her voice stirred me when I began to hear it in my head is that it sounded in the here and now and made my own contemporary activities, whether looking out my window at the leaves falling or pulling up the okra in a frost-stricken garden, come alive in a way that plumbed the roots of where I was and still am. These poems do not view life as if from under a TVA lake. They view life as an ongoing dialogue, a conversation, between present and past. And they also reach into the future, if only by insinuation. But that's the subject of another post.
Let Rob know how you feel about this after reading his review at citizen-times.com. He's eager for response both to his columns and on The Read on WNC. (thereadonwnc.ning.com) He would like more reader responses to the issues he raises on this combination of blog, message board, and author website. And by all means, go to your local bookstore and purchase this book. You will be glad you did.
(Louisiana State University Press, 1992)
3 comments:
Hello again. It's wonderful to find not only commentary, but what could almost amount to a promotion of a book of published poetry! I've pretty much given up writing poetry because I can't tell whether mine is any good. I'm a better judge of prose, hence stick to that. But I find there are things (ideas, feelings, abstractions) that cry out to be expressed in the less transparent mode of verse. Thank you for drawing our attention to more of that.
Joan, thank you for your comment. I will continue to plug books of poetry that I find important to me and possibly to others. Your are right about the the "less transparent mode of verse." Poetry is an invitation into a more mysterious realm, one that is not always easy to navigate without our poets dropping the bread crumbs of language along the way.
Not having read the new book, I can't
speak for the other poems. But nothing in your Alma is ghostly or remote -- rather, there's very much a hereness and nowness at work.
. . . following the bread crumbs. . .
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