Blossom, Stalk & Vine: Poems Reflecting a Woman's Experience (review)

And his job. Jordon persists. He is fired, just weeks before the election, but decides to solve the crime anyhow. And does, with a shrewd investigation and a surprise twist. The Appalachian atmosphere of the era—roadnouses, bootleggers lurking in the shadows, the coming of cars and ready-made cigarettes—is all very real. The camp town, owned and run by the huge lumber company, is very much like the coal camps which once dotted the Kentucky mountains. Without lecturing, without editorializing, Frank Strunk gives us an accurate depiction of life as it was in prohibition Eastern Kentucky. Frank Strunk did not have to research life in Appalachia. He is a native of rugged McCreary County in southeast Kentucky, and once served as editor of the Mt. Vernon Signal weekly newspaper and of the Rural Kentuckian magazine. He knows of what he writes, sometimes a rare commodity for those who would set their fiction in our hills. Jordon's Wager is a good crime novel, maybe a better book about 1930s Eastern Kentucky. Either way, both ways, it makes good reading. —Garry Barker Odom, Judy. Blossom, Stalk & Vine: Poems Reflecting a Woman's Experience . Memphis: Iris Press, 1990. 100 pages. $8.95. On the whole, this collection of poems, like the book itself, is charming. The title design, featuring a vine-like ampersand tipped with a bud, is exactly right and is used again, in slightly different format, to demarcate the three sections— "Blossoms," "Stalk," "Vine." Both book and poems, however, tend to excess: the cover legend is over-large, sporting letters both glit and embossed; the text is printed in green ink; the sub-title is otiose ; and the tone of some poems edges toward the sugary, a sort of Arcadian coyness. The opening section, "Blossom," introduces themes and patterns of language found throughout: adult and child, memory, seasons and cycles, music, the garden, the sea. "Stalk"—by far the strongest section—explores these first two areas especially with poems recalling parents, grandparents, and Odom's own childhood. While following the themes announced in the opening section , "Vine," the third section, is a more varied group, sending its tendrils out in different directions. "Reunion, 1967," the first poem of "Blossom," provides a good example of Odom's strengths. Look at the final stanza: He said the bombs when he released them drifted down like seeds until the waiting earth exploded into distant blossoms, lovely in the rashing silence of blue air. The line-turns clarify what is, in fact, a complex grammatical and narrative structure; the narrow, halting verse eerily echoes the unreal slowness, the unnatural stillness of the image imprinted on the Vietnam pilot's memory, echoes too his telling and the chill—the delayed chill—of his audience's understanding. The one simile, the one metaphor wrench the meaning of everything else, opening into the hideous irony reflected in that paradoxical "lovely," the synesthesia of blue silence. Other poems appearing in the first ("Blossom") section that seem to me to maintain this high level are "Kevin," "Remembered Grace," and "In Your 67 Absence." In the last ("Vine") section, "Mothers in the Park," "Song for Aging Children," and "The Diviner" all keep the promise made by the first poem in that section, one entitled "For an Old Friend." This poem, with its startling yet satisfying vine image {" . . . we sang/ old sunless ballads,/ our voices intertwining /green and thoughtless/ as two summer vines"), hints at a rich development and exploration to come, a richness which, for me, never fully emerges. In contrast, the central section ("Stalk") offers many rewarding poems, with "Legacy," "Sunday Storm, "I Remember , and "On Winter Ground" at the forefront. What I find disappointing—particularly when I have come across an image as vivid as that of the intertwining vinevoices —is Odom's failure to achieve more often or more consistently the freshness and vigor represented by that image, the sense of one absolutely right word following necessarily upon another . Although these poems do not lack similies and metaphors, scenes and characters , it is not these that linger in the mind, nor is there a lasting sense of idiom or idosyncrasy; what remains is rather an awareness...