From Seedbed to Harvest: The American Farmer (review)

BOOK REVIEW From Seedbed to Harvest: The American Farmer, Art Cuelho, Editor and Publisher, Seven Buffaloes Press, P.O. Box 249, Big Timber, Montana 59011, paperback, $6.75. "I was born and raised on a family farm." So begins Art Cuelho's introduction to his new anthology From Seedbed to Harvest, new from his Seven Buffaloes Press in January 1985. For the past seven years, this small Montana press has presented a wealth of small books concerned primarily with the rural, the local, the regional in both poetry and prose. From Seedbed to Harvest is divided into eight sections, covering seven geographical regions of the United States, and one of Western Canada. In reading this paper-back book of 113 pages, one finds crops successful and crops failed, spring rains and winter storms, memories of the past and reflections of the present. In her "Dry Creek Farmer," Dixie Partridge takes us back in time to where no one could know "what he hears from that creekbed," while Joseph Bruchac HI finds remnants of his great-grandfather's life in "Old Tools." He then ties that past to the present with lines showing how these same tools "oiled and cleaned, refitted and sharpened," can still do the work for which they were intended . In the section entitled The Deep South, R.T. Smith portrays the "voodoo rite" of first frost and hog killing, while Bettie Sellers' "Evensong for Amanda" characterizes an old farm woman and her farm. "The Storm" by William Pitt Root shows the devastation and fear generated by a Gulf Coast blow and the sight of a father coughing and burying the blood-stained handkerchiefs in fields that he will plow again when the winds have died down. Of particular interest to readers of Appalachian Heritage will be the section on "The Southern Appalachian Mountains." Here such well-known poets as Lee Pennington, Jim Wayne Miller, and James Still join forces with Astor Simpson, Patricia Shirley, William Paulk, Garry Barker, and Terra D. Stapleton. The heritage of the farm and its family is so beautifully stated in the first stanza of Pennington's "Back on the Land": "I am back on the land,/ my father's land,/ and his father's land,/ and before them, just land." And from the soil comes the singing, the voice of the poet as he speaks, half-regretfully: "...and I, weak and silly/ from too much town/ am their poetry, their child, their line/ written on a hillside page." Jim Wayne Miller's narrative poem "Lafe Surrett and the Snakes" is the sad and funny tale of how grasssnakes, copperheads, and rattlers gang up to drive a young wife from farm and husband , and Lafe, ultimately, to seek a "new bottom field" not so prolific in the raising of snakes. These are strong heart-felt poems from sixty-nine poets from the San Joaquin Valley of the West Coast to the Gulf Coast of Florida and the rocky hillsides of Maine. And there are line drawings from nine artists to illustrate old barns and old men, a handful of seeds and a dusty farm road. Rich with the very bedrock and soil of our American heritage, From Seedbed to Harvest belongs in the library of every reader who would know strong women and men, the strong indomitable land. —Bettie Sellers 117 ...