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ness ofstereotypes undermining the truth ofthe region. And as a university professor he filled a career in higher education. Finally, in his writing he turned to the novel, looking back from his home in Kentucky to his first home in North Carolina to tell the story of Robert Lee Wells, his family and an ever widening community offriends. Folk beliefs and characters from earlier poems echoed pleasantly in these pages. Ever-old, ever-fresh, this is the coming-of-age story that has engaged great tellers and ready readers through the centuries. In Newfound, Jim Wayne explores the mystery, to their children, of parents' differences, but he never exploits the pain created by their divorce . With sentiment that never spills over into sentimentality, he evokes a boy's subtle and complex relationships with others, and his response to the seasons, the natural world. Perhaps the real pleasure of Newfound is Jim Wayne's sense of irony, his sustaining humor that invites readers to laugh with, but never at, his people, his world. Itwas appropriate that ourlast briefvisit tookplace last Julyin Hindman at the ninetieth birthday celebration ofhis friend and mentor, James Still. To say that Still's classic, River ofEarth, and Miller's Newfound have much in common is not so much to compare their achievement as to appreciate the quiet, profound sense ofsimple humanity that they shared. And that they continue to share with us. —Wilma Dykeman Miller, Jim Wayne. The BrierPoems. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1997. 159 pages. Paperback. $14.50 This compilation ofthe late JimWayne Miller's The MountainsHave Come Closer (1980) and Brier, HisBook (1988) includes also some recent work. Typically, these poems describe an Appalachian scenery, a scenery both of the eye and ofthe heart. For the most part, the sentiment springing from this landscape seems deeply felt, and poems here can turn eyesores into things ofbeauty (ifnot joys forever). Presumably, the thread that binds this collection is the persona of Brier. "Brier" is a pejorative term sometimes given to Appalachians, but Miller's Brier assumes the roles of preacher, philosopher, commentator, possibly seer. Rather, I should say, these roles are conferred upon him by a narrator who remains strangely and awkwardly more remote than Brier. It is not clear why Miller chose to present so many ofthese poems in the third person. 66 The imagery and metaphor are good; the monosyllabic rhythms, entirely appropriate. But the sentiment remains questionable, in part because the omniscient narrator seems incapable ofsuch intimacywith Brier's black thoughts. This book has other limitations, certainly. In a poem called "The Country ofConscience" (dedicated to CzeslawMilosz) Millerwrites about tyranny: "This history hires plainclothes operatives/ with two rolls offat on the backs oftheir necks." (Oh, iftyranny were only so obvious in its appearance!) Miller is not the first poet who has written not well about political and social oppression. For some reason, politics and poetry often (at least in our generation) mix badly. It seems that one or the other, the poetry or the politics, must suffer in this endeavor, and it is probably better that it is so often the poetry that does. Miller's voice is strongest and most convincing when the poet is focusing on the commonplace and the domestic, things that we share beyond boundaries ofcountries, regions, and ways oflife. He, like his Brier, is at his best when he assumes the role of observer or reporter. In "The Brier's Pictorial History ofthe Mountains," Miller demonstrates that clean reporting is more powerful than the editorializing and that metaphor is still the most subtle form ofargument known to mankind: Green trees pale before deadening axes. The woods fall back, heading for high ground. Fields follow, pushing the woods uphill, taking all the ground up to the rib rock. When Miller is using this kind ofsubtlety, he can render truthfully the abstractions oflife as well as any poet can. In "His Mother's Story," Miller manages to move us with the story ofa small truth that is literally locked in the foundation ofa house. An injustice is visited upon the Brier's mother when she is a child: she has been punished for losing one ofher father's tools...

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