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And somewhere, along in there, it became a matter of pride. In the end, the novel is not about the sex, nor about the bloody violence, nor even about the wild doings of Deputy Polk and preacher Abel Hitch, but rather about another stage inJesse's life quest. The fact that this search is not as splendid as the struggle of the young narrator in Crum is not a failure of Screaming With the Cannibals but rather the memorable success of Crum. Neither novel, of course, would be anywhere near as good as it is without the humor. Lee Maynard's writing is sometimes raw but always dependably hilarious. In Cannibals the Jelly Fish Rodeo alone is worth the price of the book, and the long scene in which Jesse escapes a Kentucky revival meeting with his soul unsaved and his skin intact is vintage Maynard. Jesse doesn't find everything he's looking for in this book, but his adventures are reliably entertaining, and when he has to move on again, forgiven at last by Yvonne, he has come to recognize that his search is not only for new sights but also for an adult self with a place in the world. —Meredith Sue Willis Edwina Pendarvis. Like the Mountains ofChina. Ashland, KY: Blair Mountain Press, 2003. 78 pages. Paperback. $11.95. Edwina Pendarvis's second book-length collection of poems won't disappoint if you admire, as I do, her poetic perceptions, her careful and candid commentary on Appalachian culture, and her choice of occasionally quirky subject matter. In Like the Mountains of China, Pendarvis uses the sensibilities of Chinese poetry to create a kind of "Hillbilly Zen With An Edge." She crafts a meditative natural world while telling the truth about Appalachian life with all its problems, particularly the systematic destruction of natural and human resources by our own hands. The poems in Like the Mountains of China are divided into three sections. The first uses Chinese poetry's alacrity to establish a composed unsteadiness on the subjects of nature, animals, family, and place. The tranquility of the natural world is often undercut by the realities of modern life. In "August Afternoon," the speaker rides recklessly with a friend on a four-wheeler: 66 Bullying our way, flattening saplings, lumbering over fallen logs, ducking low-hanging branches, we tore through the forest, rode the ridges and nosed down ravines. Deep in the middle of a shady, green valley, we spotted a doe, who stopped for a moment to stare straight at us. A few yellow leaves drifted slowly down (11). The violent verbs in the first half of this passage contrast with the still images in the second half. Pendarvis is not just describing and observing in these poems; she's participating and bearing witness. At the same time, she manages to achieve, like the ancient Chinese poets, a "calm transparency," a ponderable silence. The same effect is achieved in "Appalachian Aubade," when the speaker departs for work before dawn "into the fog—a white tent / pitched from the street lamp": until I pull into a SuperAmerica, its garish red and blue muted by the sound of a fiddle from a roof-mounted speaker; the tune cuts across gray dawn like an elusive deer running through a high meadow then gone (20). Nature is often personified ("Now Spring shakes its wild, green mane") and animals—birds, deer, dogs, horses, and goats—are prominent. Family is here in these poems, too; we meet children, aunts, and parents. But the beautiful tension remains. In "In the May Evening," the speaker likens her cancer-stricken aunt to a crane, the Chinese symbol for vigilance and self-knowledge: "She comes to the door in a pink, quilted robe, her / round head covered now with white down, her / brown eyes darker than ever before" (19). In the second section of poems, the poet laments lost history, culture, and nature. Often, these poems are protests against war ("Crèche"), human greed ("Drinks Before Dinner"), and inequitable social and economic infrastructures ("Noon in Pedro, Ohio," and "Hunting, Near Pedro"). This protest, too, is a classic technique in Chinese poetry, where beauty disguises or is...

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