Annie's Night Out, and: Old Martins, New Strings (review)

cycles of earth and animals, and seasonal rituals. In Tight Lines and Out in the Country, Back Home, an old man's river fishing outing and a blind grandmother's sifting of flour become cultural and spiritual rituals celebrating the great wholeness of life. Matilda's spring and dipper symbolize traditional Appalachia and its sustaining well springs or life. In Tight Lines, Marion assimilates the external Appalachian world with the internal world of the imagination and affirms nature's restorative powers. Such customs as soap making and gardening become both natural and spiritual rituals. In Vigils, Marion links memory to the natural world and its seasons, and the significance of coming home becomes a recurrent theme. Robert Morgan views nature through a scientific perspective. In his poetry, nature assumes an adversarial role, he writes of flesh and blood characters who struggle to survive, his embodiment of fundamentalism casts a dark gloom, he stresses the importance of work as a preserver of sanity and innocence. In Groundwork, nature and the imagination embody chaos, and reason alone can give order to both. Morgan's various personas work hard upon the land, endure fire and flood, are bitten by rattlesnakes , and interpret all their experiences as the will of God. Burning the fields in spring in preparation for planting becomes symbolic of redemption by fire—a point of contact with the spiritual world, bringing knowledge, wholeness, vision and rebirth. In At the Edge of the Orchard Country, Morgan employs a variety of Appalachian personas depicting his Appalachian culture and finding direction from it. Rita Sims Quillen's Lookingfor Native Ground is a perceptive evaluation of four greatly talented major voices in contemporary Appalachian poetry— Miller, Chappell, Marion, and Morgan. She astutely observes that by embodying their own lives and family histories in their poetry and personas, these poets tell the story of a people and place and take their readers home, the long way back—wherever that happens to be—allowing them to know it and themselves, realizing perhaps for the first time that the mountains have come closer in their midquest out in the country back home at the edge of the orchard country. -John H. Spurlock Murphy, Carole. Annie's Night Out. Nightshade Press, PO Box 76, Troy, ME 04987, 1990. 28 pages. $5.00. The Mason-Dixon Trio. Old Martins, New Strings. The Soupbean Press, Box 198, Morgantown, WV 26505, 1990. Art by Randy Lykes and Terry Leffel; photography by Warene Hopson. 45 unnumbered pages of text. No price indicated. Imagine three singer/songwriter/performers in concert, taking turns. This unique collection of 45 poems by Joseph Barrett, P. J. Laska, and Bob Snyder, the Mason-Dixon Trio, suggests just such an event. While the collection is a common effort , each performer has his distinctive style, voice, and viewpoint. Readers familiar with P. J. Laska' s contributions to Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, The Unrealist, and other magazines and journals, or with his book D. C. Images and Other Poems, a National Book Award Nominee, will recognize his elegiac approach to home and family in such poems as "Mstistry," "The Women of the Forties," "Ancestorial," "Family Runes," and "The Wino Lounge." Laska's biting social critique, another aspect of his poetry, is effectively displayed in "The Day the Eighties Began" ("It was the day the President had his hair dyed/ and the Office of Budget and Management/ announced that catsup was a vegetable." In "Terry," a poem about 69 a coal camp inhabited now mostly by old people, Laska blends the elegiac with his economic and social critique: "Across the bend in the river/ is a wide piece of level land/ still owned by the Government ,/ with nothing on it/ but the foundation / of an Army camp./ If I had the money,/ I'd buy Terry/ and move it over there.' Barrett is a girl-watcher and star-gazer. In "Woman Playing a Jukebox," a poem I first read in—what, Newground?—he describes a woman ("her ass a damp valentine/ sagging in red slacks") who turns from the machine and "... carries her weight/ through smoke/ like a firegnancy/ the slightest praise could ather." Sometimes he watches from a distance...