Looking for Native Ground: Contemporary Appalachian Poetry (review)

Book Reviews Quillen, Rita Sims. Looking for Native Ground: Contemporary Appalachian Poetry. Appalachian Consortium Press, Boone, North Carolina, 1989. 68 pages. Rita Sims Quillen views Jim Wayne Miller, Fred Chappell, Jeff Daniel Marion , and Robert Morgan as four major voices in the contemporary Appalachian literary movement, and her work is a perceptive analysis of these poets' responses to the region's rapid growth and change of the past generation. These four poets share certain characteristics: they write of a particular people and culture, their recurring images reflect common events in their characters' everyday lives, they embody a strong sense of place, they stress memory's place in the creative imagination, and their poetry sharply contrasts with much of modern abstract, obscure, and highly personalized poetry. Quillen observes that these four poets have personally witnessed Appalachia's change from a traditional to a modern culture, and in basing their poetry upon their own lives and family histories, they tell the story of the Appalachian people and region. In embodying poetically the history of a people and place in transition , these four Appalachian poets, although unique and highly individual in their respective styles and poetic personas , share recurring elemental images. In a blunt and forceful style, Jim Wayne Miller, in Dialogue With a Dead Man, employs the shadow as a dominant image of the persona's struggle to accept death, loss, and regeneration—symbolically , the struggle of the Appalachian to accept the death, loss, and regeneration of the Appalachian culture in the twentieth century. In The Mountains Have Come Closer, the Brier—Miller's persona , cultural Doppelganger and spokesman of the Appalachian people—urges them to reject the romantic version of Appalachia, its physical trappings, and the stereotyping by the media, intellectuals , politicians, and churchmen and retain the spirit of their traditional culture. Should Miller's Appalachian not define himself in terms of his unique culture, he will awake one day and find he has "settled in a suburb north of himself in Everywhere, USA, having lost the spirit of his culture. Fred Chappell's persona, in The World Between the Eyes, rebels against the restrictions of his Appalachian world and the strangling effect of family. He rebels against the oppressive nature of his father and his mother's meekness and focuses upon the door of the family home, gateway to freedom beyond the dark hills of his birth. In Midquest, different personas of an Appalachian family speak, revealing the good and bad aspects of mountain life. Chappell's central persona breaks free of Appalachia but never forgets the importance of being reborn—he takes the best of his culture with him into the outer world; allaying his grandmother's fears that he would not know or understand his past and become a rootless member of the middleclass, he has become a whole person. Unlike Miller and Chappell, Jeff Daniel Marion rarely employs Appalachian personas but discovers larger truths through embodying nature, the 68 cycles of earth and animals, and seasonal rituals. In Tight Lines and Out in the Country, Back Home, an old man's river fishing outing and a blind grandmother's sifting of flour become cultural and spiritual rituals celebrating the great wholeness of life. Matilda's spring and dipper symbolize traditional Appalachia and its sustaining well springs or life. In Tight Lines, Marion assimilates the external Appalachian world with the internal world of the imagination and affirms nature's restorative powers. Such customs as soap making and gardening become both natural and spiritual rituals. In Vigils, Marion links memory to the natural world and its seasons, and the significance of coming home becomes a recurrent theme. Robert Morgan views nature through a scientific perspective. In his poetry, nature assumes an adversarial role, he writes of flesh and blood characters who struggle to survive, his embodiment of fundamentalism casts a dark gloom, he stresses the importance of work as a preserver of sanity and innocence. In Groundwork, nature and the imagination embody chaos, and reason alone can give order to both. Morgan's various personas work hard upon the land, endure fire and flood, are bitten by rattlesnakes , and interpret all their experiences as the will of God. Burning...