The Training Class Finds a Mole on the Pavement

Book Review Shirley, Patricia. Pearl. Seven Buffaloes Press, Box 249, Big Timber, Montana 59011. Paperback, $4.50. Ordinarily I would shy away from publicly commenting on a book of poems with about the same degree of intensity that I shy away from trying to write them. But there is something so compelling about Patricia Shirley's new book of poems, Pearl, that all my natural reluctance to engage poetry as reader or writer is overcome . These are story-telling poems deeply rooted în American and Appalachian history. There are seventeen poems in all, filling a total of thirty-four pages. Each poem is its own entity, organically complete on its own terms. But as a collection, the poems give energy and meaning to each other until the cumulative effect approaches the epic. The poems are finely crafted as written verse, but the illusion of oral delivery is so perfect we have the double satisfaction of reading good writing and hearing good talking at the same time. The narrator is Pearl Kline, a mountain woman who is recounting her family's history from its beginnings in the "old country," through its move to the New World in the 1730s, its settlement on the Appalachian frontier, then its progress across the decades to the 1980s. Most of the poems are about memorable people and experiences within the family, but several refer to public events and figures which are part of the mountain region's historic legacy. Pearl's strong voice which resonates with wisdom gained from experiences, threads these elements with charm and true narrative power, so that in the end it is a single story we hear, a memorable Appalachian story, memorably told. —Gurney Norman The Training Class Finds a Mole on the Pavement We thought you loved the dark, thought you had a good life in your underground world but we learned different early this morning finding you frozen, your thick hands held out. We had nothing to give you so we pretended piety and walked away rationalizing: He thought he could dig through asphalt. He forgot mornings are cold here. He wanted to live on the other side. —Nancy Simpson 70 ...