The Wolfpen Poems (review)

Still, James. The Wolfpen Poems. Berea, Kentucky: The Berea College Press, 1986. Hardback with dust jacket, $10.95. August 8, 1986—Hindman, Kentucky: A dry summer here, too, at the Hindman Settlement School on the Forks of Troublesome Creek. Daily for almost a week now I've crossed the footbridge spanning Troublesome Creek and looked down at a creek reduced to "drying pools" filled with minnows. A few of them are already dead, their white bellies floating to the surface. Some mornings I've lingered on the bridge to watch the crawdads return to the half-submerged plank and the minnows rise to the surface, flit about, safe for the moment from the sounds of approaching footsteps or from the water snake who a couple of mornings ago took his fill of trapped, easy prey in this "island of water." I recall the first poem in James Still's The Wolfpen Poems: Leap Minnows, Leap The minnows leap in drying pools. In islands of water along the creekbed sands They spring on drying tails, white bellies to the sun, Gills spread, gills fevered and gasping. The creek is sun and sand, and fish throats rasping. One pool has a peck of minnows. One living pool Is knuckle deep with dying, a shrinking yard Of glittering bellies. A thousand eyes look, look, A thousand gills strain, strain the water-air. There is plenty of water above the dam, locked and deep, Plenty, plenty and held. It is not here. It is not where the minnows spring with lidless fear. They die as men die. Leap minnows, leap. And I recall the moments when James Still recounted the occasion of that poem to my poetry class at the Appalachian Writers Workshop: he told of a dry summer in 1939 when he daily drew water from his well and carried buckets full to the drying pools to save what minnows he could. Now almost fifty years since the writing of this poem, the ripples still reach us, touch the universal and continuing problem, "Plenty, plenty and held. It is not here." I think of all the poems in The Wolfpen Poems by that image: James Still carefully nurturing, sustaining through poetry that which is endangered, dying, passing away, swept along on "the mighty river of earth." And I admire both the vision and the voice which give life to these experiences. James Still looks closely at the struggles in the hills of Kentucky—he does not blur the edges for effect. Instead he sees clearly and sympathetically the mix of pain and joy, the ongoing struggle of all creatures in a specific place and time striving, enduring. The voice that conveys this vision is supple, ironic, both lyric and tense. The lines of these poems are taut as a dulcimer's strings. Some of us have waited a long time for this gathering, these buckets of water from James Still's well. And now we can turn to The Wolfpen Poems and say "Plenty, plenty and held. It is here." —Jeff Daniel Marion 69 ...