Horrifying, Brave and Beautiful: Poetic Realism and Appalachian Outmigration in the Poetry of Jeanne Bryner

ESSAY Horrifying, Brave and Beautiful: Poetic Realism and Appalachian Outmigration in the Poetry of Jeanne Bryner__________ Joyce Compton Brown Among the most marginalized Appalachian voices in a marginalized discipline are those of women who speak from the literal fringes of Appalachia, from the mill towns of the valleys, foothills and Piedmont. The wreckage of this outmigration is a fit subject for poetry, and Jeanne Bryner depicts that wreckage stripped of all romanticized ideals about strong, displaced Appalachian women, families and their heroic survival. Some contemporary Appalachian women poets look to the richness of the past. Some continue a ruralized vision of Appalachia. And some poets, such as Hazel Dickens and Jean Ritchie, give us the richness of the poetry ofprotest in song. But as a poet and as a woman, Bryner is distinctive in her strong, stark poetic realism; indeed, her analysis of family destruction in an outmigration economy is horrifying, brave, and beautiful. Bryner lives in the Ohio valley, her father having moved the family from the mountains to the supposedly better life of the steel mill village. Today she is a nurse whose poetry is permeated with the ways in which life mutilates its victims spiritually, mentally and physically. The fragility of life and the risks of living it withdrawn, bent, shriveled to nearly nothing dominate even the happiest of her poems. Of her husband, she writes: There is a point of grace where my husband's arms are a slow creek, where I empty my pockets a fount for washing away what I cannot bear to carry alone in this world. ("Where I Empty My Pockets" 11. 38-46) 31 And of the greatjoy of her daughter, she writes to her own mother: . . . the children in our valley still see their father's body mustbe given up. But .. . she believes in her father, believes he is a mountain. . . . ("The Labor of Tenderness" 11. 48-51) Thus, even in her poems not directly about her Appalachian roots, images ofAppalachia and its healing nature permeate—creek,fount, valley, mountain. Her first-generation Appalachian outmigrant's experience has given her that Emily Dickinson "microscopes are prudent" view of life, while her career as a nurse has honed her awareness, implicit in her poetry, ofthe universal suffering of the uprooted, no matter what form that uprooting takes. In "I Have Onlya BroomHandle," for instance, a robin's nest, fallen, doomingitsbabies to slow,helpless death, evokes associations with universal suffering, particularly among women. Bryner and her daughter give up on saving the robins, the poet concluding, We are just women waiting in our home For a terrible silence that will surely come. (11. 13-14) In her poems about doctors, firemen, nurses, Bryner portrays men and women who help others to survive. She says of her daughter: I try to tell her about men who are gentle and strong men who rise without hesitation, become larger than themselves. .. . ("Birch Canoe" 11. 21-24) Of her own profession, nursing, she writes, Our story is how we did not shrivel, though we were soaked . . . Our story is how we did not break and run—no matter how close The lightning gouged. ("Standing There" 11. 18-23) Bryner's poetry is filled with falling birds with damaged wings and butterflies no longer able to soar—aids patients, cancerous 32 children, rape victims. As a nurse and poet, she expresses the painful, ripping physicality of life, particularly in her chapbook, Breathless, now in its third printing. Many of those whose wings are shattered are women. Bryner has devoted much of her personal life and energies to conducting writing workshops in cancer support groups and nursing homes and to producing anthologies of writing by breast cancer survivors. Song (2000) is her most recent such collection. She has also created a photo documentary entitled Let Us Now Praise Nurses. Clearly, her passion for the broken and her drive to serve as a healing force permeate her life as well as her poetry. Bryner's most powerful poems having to do with the Appalachian outmigration are in Blind Horse, published in 1999. Her epigraph, "The blind horse is fittest for the mill" (from Southerne's Maid's Last Prayer...