Mary Pearl Kline, and: Paint Lick Idyll and Other Poems (review)

One of her suggestions for enhancing a sense of humor is " . . . read several jokebooks and select only the jokes that make you burst out laughing." One might begin with Humor: The Magic of Genie. Humor: The Magic of Genie can be ordered from local bookstores or directly from Genie, 2905 Forestdale Drive, Burlington, NC 27215, $14.95 plus $2.00 handling and postage. -Joanne Brannon AIdridge Shirley, Patricia. Mary Pearl Kline. Seven Buffaloes Press, Big Timber, Montana. 98 pages. Paperback. $7.95. Patricia Shirley, who lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee, writes what Gurney Norman called "story-telling poems," rooted in oral tradition and "real history. Mary Pearl Kline continues that poetic saga of the Fleming family, begun in Pearl a few years back. There is a clear and simple voice here, a very real person speaking, as in "Things, They Work Out, 1924": The Lord don't give all good things, Hallie, else we'd not have room to grow. Put your faith in him and do your best. Things, they work out. I come from a people very much like these in Mary Pearl Kline; I hear a familiar stubborn resignation, mixed with pride and self-reliance, and I know this poet is correctly presenting the way things were. And, the way things are: When Ma heard how her Cincinnati granddaughters dressed with skirts above the knees and hair shingled a'top the ears she thought the worst and throwed up her Christian hands with "I've done lived too long?" In "Family Fruit, 20th Century," Pat Shirley tells about Herman and Carlisle, content to settle nearby and mellow to a shining turn; while some folks think Ben has replaced his crop with a doctoring degree, over in Louisville. And there's Will, loving every truck he's ever met and marrying rancid at cost has contended with worms attacking his core. Hugh Bailey's cover art and illustrations simply add to the pleasure of Mary Pearl Kline. To me, a transplanted mountaineer who still loves every truck he's ever met, this is mighty fine reading . Brown, Harry. Paint Lick Idyll and Other Poems. The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY. 72 pages. Paperback. $14:95. We need Harry Brown's new book, writes Fred Chappell, "because a thousand other poets writing for a thousand years shall not produce the qualities this highly individual poet offers." Harry Brown, an Eastern Kentucky University professor who lives near Paint Lick, Kentucky, writes about rural beauty and values, from cutting tobacco to clipping pastures, and about unique people like Old Preacher Papa": You preach in the woods Jo chickens, your first flock, under no illusions that a cackly flutter ytp in trees will utter tongues, keep the faith, or even believe./ You know no madness 61 evangelic or poetic. You know simply a passion to preach. In "February Talks to Mules," Brown writes: Yesterday the earth fooled me. The sun Had shone all that February morning Until by noon I thought the ground had thawed a bit. I started Molly, our ancient Massey Ferguson the carry-all on the three-point hitch To carry two chain saws, a gallon of gas, And bar-and-chain oil down the hill to cut firewood. On the way down a steep, muddylooking hill Brown made a discovery: But underneath this slash of rind the earth was frozen hard, so the side of the hill was like a little glacier brushed with lard. Molly the Massey Ferguson, Amos the tobacco cutter, dandelions, bulls, Elbertas and Staymans, and barn swallows are the stuff of Paint Lick Idyll, but don't expect a folksy dialogue; as the foreword proclaims, Harry Brown fulfills his duty to "articulate the truth about things, to delineate with love and in knotty detail the texture of rural life," and he does it with skill, style, and a unique metric sense perhaps best illustrated in "Barn Swallows": Their backs purple, wings edged brown Throats chestnut and bellies buff, Their tails forks, their wings scythes, Circling, swooping, darting right and left Making uneven, scalloped loops. Be it glaciers brushed with lard or fluttering barn swallows, Harry Brown's insights into the knotty detail of...