Our Mountain (review)

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 mountain. Our house is on the edge of the Monongahela National Forest, in West Virginia. A lot of our land is in woods, but we have a big garden and an orchard and a few fields." That's how Ellen Harvey Showell's great-nephews, Jimmy and Corey Allder, begin telling about their mountain, and the fun they have living there. "During my visits to their mountain," the author says, "the boys would take me on walks and tell me about their adventures." She listened. And instead of telling about the boys, she has permitted them to tell their own story. "When you are far away," the boys explain, "our mountain looks like a big round hill covered with trees. But if you climb up, it changes. About thirty families live on our mountain. Most people don't live close together, but they are almost all friendly." They tell "Why We Don't Have Honey." Bears raided the hives one summer . Their mother says a bear came to the house while everyone else was away and knocked on a window. The next day, when their father went down to check the hives, "a bear jumped up right behind him." The bear and their 70 father ran in opposite directions, and they haven't had honey since that summer. They describe their house, which is constandy being added on to; a hard rain that flooded die basement. They tell what it's like to ride die school bus off the mountain to school: At the post office, there's a Coke machine and a "sign pointing to Pumpkin Center, which is not on die map but is still a place where people live." They tell about a cemetery; an abandoned house that is their haunted house (there's another house that can be seen only "between four o'clock and six o'clock, from a certain point on the road, on Tuesdays and Thursdays"); a trip to the river and an encounter with a nest of yellowjackets; a raft trip down the river with their parents; tree houses; forts; secret places. In "A Hidden Cave and Something We Hid" the boys tell about burying a time capsule in a cave. "It would be something somebody might find five hundred years later and it would tell them something about us. We put things our dad calls 'Good Medicine'—things that are important to you and so have a spirit—in a quart mason jar ... . Some of the things we put in were arrowheads, some baseball cards, a piece of rubber, a plastic necklace, a battery, a comic book, and a two-dollar bill." Our Mountain is itself a time capsule, for it will tell anyone who comes across it, now or years later, not only something about these...