A Dancing Fox. Collected Poems: 1949-1985 (review)

Book Reviews Brown, James S. Beech Creek: A Study of a Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood. Berea, KY: Berea College Press, 1987. 297 pages. Publication by the Berea College Press of James S. Brown's 1950 Harvard dissertation, revised and condensed by Howard Beers, makes this seminal and widely-known study available to a much broader audience of scholars in other disciplines and general readers. Brown's famous study has over the years spawned a plethora of "Beech Creek Studies" by other scholars interested in pursuing the continuing saga, particularly patterns of migration, from the three neighborhoods in eastern Kentucky whose anonymity is protected by the fictitious name Beech Creek. It is a remarkable tribute to Brown's work that it remains fresh and readable thirty-eight years later. 1942 and 1943 were years of transition for Beech Creek, but the traditional structures of the agrarian community still remained largely intact. Brown concluded that Beech Creek had an economy still based on subsistence agriculture, a kinshipdominated social organization which was differentiated along class lines, and a traditionalistic value system characterized by familism, puritanism, and individualism . In the midst of this sociological analysis , however, Brown was perceptive enough to realize the human and personal complexity of the Beech Creek neighborhoods and people, both of which were filled with an infinite degree of subtle variation and neither of which fit very exactly into sociological models. Clearly Brown liked and respected his subjects, and this sympathetic understanding of the Beech Creek people and their ways continues to be the book's greatest strength. Finally, Beech Creek is also a valuable historical account of a traditional eastern Kentucky mountain community just before major changes occurred. I suspect that much of the mountain culture Brown documents, including the life style of the Beech Creek people, despite its complexity and diversity, is not dissimilar from hundreds of other rural, isolated communities in Appalachia before World War II. In any event, Beech Creek remains a fascinating account of a complex community in transition and will continue to be both a guide and a measuring rod for future Appalachian scholars. -Durwood Dunn A Dancing Fox. Collected Poems: 19491985 . Otisville, NY: Birch Brook Press, 1988. 164 pp. Cloth: $16.95; paper: $10.95. Francis Pledger Hulme's first collection of poems, Come Up the Valley, appeared in 1949, published by Rutgers University Press. A second gathering, Mountain Measure, was published in 1975 by the Appalachian Consortium Press. The Saturday Review and The Library Journal praised Come Up the Valley, and Mountain Measure received the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award, as well as an award from the North Carolina Arts Council. With half a dozen exceptions, this volume excludes poems from the first two collections, so it is only with the publication of A Dancing Fox (arranged into sections before the poet's death in 1986), that the full range of Hulme's poetry, the distillation of a rich life, has become available. And Hulme's range is impressive. He is erudite, as in the title poem, "A Dancing Fox" (after a print by Koson): 62 Children, we know this fox and why he dances Ironic sarabands, tawny and white, Balancing tail and toe, his black pads lifted To hold in place that Oriental delight, His hat. . . . He is bawdy, in a poem entitled "Hot Stuff," and witty in a series of Foibles for Critics which includes Faulkner: Here's Troy burned and Agamemnon's fits Served up with black-eyed peas, hog jowls, and grits. and Frost: He scythes the landscape with one sure slice To show us hell beneath New England ice. The thirty-five "Richmond Hill Sonnets ," named after a place on the west bank of the French Broad River, near Asheville, North Carolina, are extremely well-crafted; yet within the discipline of strict form, they embody the qualities conspicuous in all of Hulme's work: earthiness, humor, and mystery, along with accessibility. The Richmond Hill Sonnets begin: Darling, if you were not already dead, You'd die to know I've put you in a book. I see you now, tossing your pretty head, Giving me what we called your country look. In his life and in his art...