Between the Thorns: Windcarver Songs of Appalachia (review)

for its treatment of subjects like leisure, company stores, and company churches, and for its photographs of artifacts such as meeting announcements, building plans, educational tracts, and "yellow dog contracts." This is Appalachian history at its best, and a book to add much to our future debates about the complexity of community forms in the region. —Tom Boyd M. Ray Allen. Between the Thorns: Windcarver Songs ofAppalachia. Fairfax Station, Virginia: Road Publishers, 1991. 62 pages. $9.95. M. Ray Allen, a native of Floyd County, Kentucky, now makes his home in Clifton Forge, Virginia, where he serves as president of Appalfolks of America. This major collection of his poems follows close upon a 1990 chapbook, and offers us a fuller experience of a mature poet coming to terms with what it means to be an Appalachian American. To be a "windcarver" is to be in motion, particularly to be "on the road" like Jack Kerouac, who is invoked in several of the poems, or the fatal Hart Crane whose brooding spirit "plunges into [his] thoughts" as Allen gazes into a turbulent mountain stream, or "waits on the brink/ beyond [this] eyelids' blink toward sleep." Motion evokes emotion, and emotion is most often the thorn on which the poet spears his words, "writhing" like the "butcher bird's impaled lizard." It was a writer far different from a Kerouac or Crane, however, who suggested that poetry is born "between the thorns" in those moments when emotion is recollected in tranquility. That poet, Wordsworth, would understand Ray Allen's struggle with vision and re-vision in these poems. He understood the "tyranny of the eye," the seeing that gets in the way of re-seeing or understanding. How glibly we say "I see" when we mean "I understand." For Ray Allen, the operative verb in this collection is "see" or its synonyms: watch, gaze, squint, scan, peep, spot, look. Tension and conflict in the poems come when something interferes with that seeing. In "The Hill" he says, "But my hill left me, went its own way,/ Went back to being its old self/ When TV came into my father's house." Television is a different kind of vision, a different kind of seeing, as the greatgrandmother has learned to her sorrow in "No Reruns," "turning away from the set/ as Captain Kirk fires his phaser." How can her old stories, her vision, compete with this new vision? How, the poet implies, can his? Ray Allen fires a few phasers of his own in this volume. "I have resisted all attempts," he says in "Prelude," "to make me over into desirable Eastern image ." He calls himself "the prodigal returned" in "From the Hilltop," but in "Only Yesterday" he worries that he has "sold out," "Sold myself/ shorter than 69 I care to say." Sometimes the visionary says that he remains "a prisoner of [this] dream." He longs, as in "Transformation," "for escape to make my eye, heart, and mind act as one." The crux of Ray Allen's poetry is there in that one line: "to make my eye [vision], heart [emotion] and mind [that re-vision or understanding] act as one." Of course, they never act as one, but that has never kept poets, those who by definition live "between the thorns," from believing they do. Give that up and there is no poetry. Jim Wayne Miller's introduction to this volume rightly says that Allen's "subjects and themes, while intimately bound up with his individual experience, give expression to a collective experience of the [Appalachian] region's population ." Nowhere is that expression realized more clearly than in "The Tree and Beyond" where Allen says, "Beyond the tree I see strangers moving/ beside the stumps of the silver maples/ my grandfather planted in his yard./ They have built their driveway through his garden." What he "sees" in his backyard, we can all see in ours. His gift, the poet's gift, is to help us transform our seeing into understanding. —Parks Lanier Jimmy and Corey Allder, as told to Ellen Harvey Showell. Our Mountain. Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter. New York: Bradbury Press, 1991. 73 pages. $12.95. "We live on a...