Old Wounds, New Words: Poems From the Appalachian Poetry Project (review)

forests themselves—but so far the Appalachians have bounced back surprisingly well. Where the logging crews scaled the land a century ago the trees have regrown and if the woods are not as towering and expansive as they once were, their very existence in the heavily populated, heavily industrialized East is almost a miracle. The healing continues; within my lifetime the bears have returned to the ridge that I see from my window, and so have the goshawks and the ravens and the bobcats. This is a bruised but resilient land, if we give it a chance." —Rudy Abramson Bob Henry Baber, George EUa Lyon, and Gurney Norman, editors. Old Wounds, New Words: Poems From the Appalachian Poetry Project. Ashland, Ky.: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1994. 202 pages. $9.95. "These are the snapshots I want to carry with me," writes David Jarvis in Old bounds, New Words, as he recalls images of "first my sister/then my grandmother" on a warm Thanksgiving Day. Old Wounds, New Words, an anthology of work by ninety-one poets from the southern Appalachian region, is like a good collection of snapshots. The reader will want to consider the images separately and remember them well. The poems were collected and selected through the Appalachian Poetry Project way back in 1980, but the poetry is as fresh, vibrant, alive, unique, and universal as the day it was written. The poems are arranged alphabetically by author's name. This focuses the reader's attention on each individual poet rather than on common issues or themes among the poems. Yet two themes do emerge, as George EUa Lyon points out in her thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction. One theme is the strong family ties among mountain people, or as Lyon says, "the bonds between generations." Mary Jo Coleman, for example, writes of "Floyd Coleman, My Grandfather." Bennie Lee Sinclair pays tribute to her grandmother, "remembering what truth her hands used to weave." In "Dogwood Tree," Marita Garin describes how "In a room my father strains/against the heavy air/ in his chest." The second theme is what Lyon calls a "strong tie to the land," and many others have called a sense of place. "I'm Cold Knob born/Cold Knob bred/'n' when I die, by God/I'm gonna be Cold Knob dead," says Bob Henry Baber's Aunt Pearl. Jeff Daniel Marion writes about how Appalachians give directions: "It's just/over the knob/there—you know the place." "I hoe thawed ground/with a vengeance," says 61 Kathryn Stripling Byer. "I hoe/this earth until I think of nothing/but the beans I will string/the sweet corn I will grind into meal." Coal was still king in 1980 when these verses were first collected, and many of the poems bear the mark of that dominance. In "3 A.M. Train," "it seems," to Gail Amburgey, "as though/the railroad cars/are loading up souls/along with the coal./Souls of dead miners that owe their essence/to that life-giving cinder." Russell Maraño describes "Flora," "Husband killed by company mines,/evicted from company house." In "The Last Unmined Vein," Lee Howard writes "Now my daddy and me/we used to dig a little coal/out of that vein across the bottom." Like Jean Ritchie's song "Black Waters," these poems have lost none of their power now that King Coal has been dethroned. Instead their power is heightened because the terrible destruction wreaked by coal has proven to be for naught. Old Wounds, New Words is a tribute to the Appalachian Poetry Project, to the ninety-one poets who contributed, and to the Jesse Stuart Foundation which published the collection in a handsome paperback edition. Yet as Gurney Norman notes in his dedication, the book is also a tribute "to the twenty million people of the Appalachian Region of North America." As George Ella Lyon carefully explains in the introduction , "Through intense selectivity in imagery, in rhythm, in sound, and in word, poetry calls forth value; its light shines on the few things chosen till they become luminous, radiating a truth long locked within." Old Wounds, New Words shines the light...