Vigils, Selected Poems (review)

forces which gave them shape, Dorgan sees patterns which could have developed only in Appalachia. "Religion and region, practice and place," he writes, "merged to create a spiritual expression originally not heard outside the Cumberlands ." There are, in fact, Old Regular Baptist churches outside Appalachia, and Dorgan has since attended one of them, the Ypsilanti church in Michigan. An account of his visit will soon be published in the Appalachian Journal. But the church, of course, is attended by Appalachian out-migrants who maintain strong ties to their ancestral homes. This summer I also attended an Old Regular service—this time in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens in Washington state. Years ago a considerable number of lumbermen migrated to the Pacific Cascades from the Welch and Beckley areas of West Virginia and the Wolf Pen Creek area of Kentucky. Their descendants still live in or near the little towns of Mineral, Morton, and Silver Creek. In the regular worship service at Western Union Church, in the communion and footwashing which followed it, and at the potluck dinner held later, I could just about close my eyes and imagine myself back in Eastern Kentucky. Fifty years ago, Woodrow Clevinger, himself the descendant of Appalachian out-migrants, wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Washington. In the dissertation he described the "Appalachians" of the Pacific Cascades. One of the bonds which held them together as a people, he argued, was their distinctive religion. These bonds, I discovered, were still strong. When one reads Howard Dorgan's recent book, one can understand why. -Harry Robie Marion, Jeff Daniel. Vigils, Selected Poems. Appalachian Consortium Press, Boone, North Carolina, 1990. 77 pages. $9.95. The cover illustration for this deeply appealing collection of poems shows a rough plank table for two diners. The table is beside a window with a little ledge from which an oil-burning lamp casts a bright patch of light onto the table and into the darkness outside. Absolutely lovely. The work of William Charles Houston. Enough light to eat by, enough brightness to make life worth living, a light wedge against the outside blackness. Houston's illustration shows a touching sensitivity to the basic theme of this collection: there is enough light to make a barrier against the dark and cold if we give the light a little assistance. From the ending of "Letter": where already the world grows dark & cold: winter comes, I say, and stoke the fire once more for the night, this day's blackberry staining my windowsill. From "Untamed": Dark, darker; waves coming, rising within to wash our lives. Outside, each snowflake locks in light laying down a whiteness. Or even more explicitly from "Dark Days": The story I have come to is this: gathering words, kindling & song, a way to warm us for the cold dark days of this lingering weather. This collection is divided into three sections: Making Believe, Listening to the Land, and Simple Gifts. This thematic grouping makes sense but isn't really necessary. The poems are accessible , each strong in its own right. "Orpha" may be a bit strained; "Recipe" courts excessive cleverness, but this mild 68 negative may just come from the reviewer's need to prove she read with great care. Reading Marion's poems with great care is the sweetest kind of pleasure. He has a nearly flawless ear: his easy-toswallow unpretentious iambic lines are always appropriate to his subjects. There is something beautifully unteased about his metrics, his easy handling of alliteration and assonance—so beautiful, so easy that one forgives his little fetish for & instead of and. But that little fetish may not really require forgiveness; perhaps it is just his way of keeping the lines as tight as possible by scrapping a couple of unnecessary letters. The syntax is standard—no prodding and poking and torturing of natural rhythms of Enlish speech; yet each line has great poetic tension. There are poems about the thirst for home, for natural sounds in the woods, for bird song, for smells of earth and ginger. There are poems that are intensely weather aware, that count the time of day and time of year as important concerns , but...