The Land of Responsibilities

By Andrew J. Rappel and Arvin Jupin THE LAND OF RESPONSIBILITIES by Andrew J. Kappel Short and Simple Annals : Poems about Appalachia by Llewellyn McKernan Perfect Printing, Inc. (Huntington, West Virginia, 1979) $3.00 Short and Simple Annals, published with a grant from the American Association of College Women, is Llewellyn McKernan 's first book of poems. The title refers to Thomas Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor. Like Gray in his poem, like Wordsworth, for that matter, in the Lyrical Ballads, McKernan in Short and Simple Annals demonstrates for us the value of the rural life as a subject for poetry. Country people, unlike, say, John Ashbery's alienated city people, live lives tied tightly to their surroundings. Unlike the urban poet's monotone of alienation, McKernan 's song ranges high and low in order to register all the moods in which her country characters respond to their world. They are, like Wordsworth's characters, independent, extreme, eccentric, often very young or very old, often loners. McKernan finds for them within the confines of their country world many opportunities to reveal the unsettling extremities of human nature. There is "The Cat Woman of Huntington" who follows cats into trash cans and "sits upon/something slimy she can't see." "Fur sprouts behind her ears/She begins to see in the dark/she licks her paw." There is "The Gardener of Gilmer County" who "tilled the small garden of her sensibility." She raised "carrots of happiness," "tomatoes of passion," "lettuce beds of meditation," "the bean of friendship," 56 "the cucumber of compromise," "the onions of sadness" and "the potatoes of rage, which dug their roots deeper, their eyes filling with dirt." There is the little girl in the poem "Music" who tells about the front gate of her house "that creaked when the wind opened it." "This music," she says . . . rivaled the bee's tiny bell, the bird's bubbling promise. Most of the time I heard it: the iron gate's solo, its dog face looking both ways, its ears curled up like snails. Sometimes I made this music myself: Swinging back and forth, listening to the click and moan that sounded like my heart in the dead of night when in the bedroom alone I heard through the wall the ghost of a quarrel: mother's dark hair, pressed against the chair's pale flank, my father's fist raised and juggling the anger that when it fell smashed my mother's face in two like precious china. Many of the poems in Short and Simple Annals are portraits such as these. The girl in "Music" is a recurrent figure in the book, and the other poems in which she figures are, like "Music," concerned not only with the demonstration of her intense, attentive nature, but as well with the rural family environment which provides her with so many opportunities for intensity, which obsesses her attention. She has a sister, her . . . arch enemy, It's true, really. The old cliche, We competed frantically for my momma's love: what there was of it. She used to wring the neck off chickens, wishing it was my daddy's. Screwing it till it popped off. "Nothing frightened me more," she tells us, than her sister's violence, . . . unless it was my daddy, getting high on adultery, or me, trying to permanently throttle my sister. 57 The longest poem of the volume, "Mountain Magic," focuses on the relationship between the young girl and her mother; its aim is to define the effect of the mother on the child, to calculate a maternal heritage. Momma is an eccentric health food nut who will feed only carob to her daughter. John the Baptist, who used it to sustain himself during his stay in the wilderness, had given her the recipe—or so she claimed. The daughter is a victim, as the young often are in McKernan's book, overpowered by the wildness of the adult. But if she bears a grudge she...