The Holy Season: Walking in the Wild (review)

Whether one is just discovering the works of Appalachian writers, or is the owner of an entire library of such books, A Gathering at the Forks will prove a sumptuous feast, and I, for one, can hardly wait for the next anthology! —Ginny Carney Albert Stewart. The Holy Season: Walking in the Wild. Berea, Kentucky: Berea College Press, 1993. 64 pages. $14.00. The world of Albert Stewart's long-awaited new poem sequence, The Holy Season: Walking in the Wild, is both physical and metaphysical, corporeal and immanent, sacred and profane, past and present. Everything in nature—that is, everything the poet sees, or has seen, in his walks in the woods on and near his beloved Yellow Mountain in Knott County, Kentucky—is both intensely itself, and just as intensely, a sign of an organic, coherent, cosmic whole. If the purpose of literature is to unify a fragmented world and discover its relation to the self, Stewart has taken a more ambitious stab at it than most. More moving, too: for The Holy Season, while uneven as a sequence, contains a dozen or so of the most deeply felt and most flat-out beautiful poems you will ever read. Here nature, keenly observed and fiercely cherished, seems to act as springboard into meditation and then into memory. Landscape and history dovetail in these poems like melody and harmony; the effect is a sweet, sad, shimmering singing. A kind of aura surrounds everything, revealing rather than obscuring its essence. Readers who are familiar with Stewart as the author of the 1962 collection The Untoward Hills or, more likely, as an important teacher and encourager of Appalachian writers and founder of this magazine, may be taken aback by the depth of emotion and largeness ofvision here. Nothing has prepared us for the haunting mysticism of the tide poem, in which animals become "dark sayings, flexible metaphors," and in which They can think themselves into something else. Their eyes burn in the dark, brimmed with light. They eat each other .... Neither has anything prepared us for the stunned witness of "Sunday Morning Deer" ("Receptor ears/alert. Reflector eyes receiving. The ancient saving/habit") or the trembling supplicant of "The Letter" ("Whisper/the Saving Word") and "The Way" ("I survive/gulping air like a fish/hollow as a bird bone"). 59 The best surprise of all is the sheer gorgeousness of some of these poems, especially "The Holy Season," "Sunday Morning Deer," "a Condition of Memory," "The Message" and, above all, "Journey into Autumn." These five poems alone, with their hypnotic rhythms and sumptuous diction, make this book a landmark in the region's literature and a feast for poetry lovers everywhere. "Journey," for example, is the hymn of a celebrant who has been told the most sacred secrets of the universe and wants to pass them on: Here is ginseng for you, pawpaws, arrowwood pods, a leaf like a cool flame (a camouflage of dying still green along the veins), a root of wild ginger. They are born of earth, air, light, and the secret ingredient—epitomes of the year, epiphanies. You will not find these in any other supermarket. Not now. Not ever. See intricate designs of wildness. Taste a seasoned earth. Smell the ginger. There are, I'm afraid, a few problems with the book. Some of the poems simply don't approach the standard set by the ones I've mentioned—perhaps an impossible task. Some treat their subjects in a manner that is too academic and abstract to be involving, and others might better have been included in future collections because they don't seem to add to the overall theme of this one. Perhaps most bothersome of all, the book seems cluttered, mainly by a profusion of unnecessary and distractingly conspicuous epigraphs (there's one for almost every poem). Still, The Holy Season is, on balance, an extraordinary book, one in which Stewart's considerable passion, imagination, intelligence, and skill are evident throughout. You feel he's poured all his love, all his long life, all his soul into this work; its publication inspires a strong feeling of rightness (and of gratitude to Berea College Press...