Sporty Creek by James Still (review)

to counter the attitudes others hold toward them. Emma Creekmore nurses Delph's sick baby, and Sober Creekmore rescues Delph during a flood, something Marsh realizes "not another man in the neighborhood ... could have done" (258). Characters like these, as well as the widowed farmer Dorie Dodson Fairchild and the outspoken county agent Roan Sandusky, play important parts in the primary story of Marsh and Delphine Costello Gregory. But while Between the Flowers contains a number of memorable characters, it also exhibits some of the characteristic weaknesses of Arnow's fiction, most prominently an occasionally awkward rendering of dialect. Several of the key events—Marsh's striking of a pregnant Delph, the flood and Burr-Head's birth, Delph's death—seem at first sensational or melodramatic. Yet ultimately, the novel resists these labels because of Arnow's focus on two fully developed individuals who want different things from life. Perhaps more than any other writer of mid-century, Harriette Simpson Arnow realistically and sympathetically depicted the lives of hard-working rural people. Between the Flowers offers new evidence of her commitment to doing so. —Martha Billips James Still. Sporty Creek. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1999. 128 pages. $9.95. It's a happy occasion when a book by James Still appears, even if it's a different version of an old book. So, fans of the beloved Kentucky author will want to get the new edition of Sporty Creek. "This means all my works, except for a few poems that haven't been collected, are now in print," Still said last week. As he explained, Sporty Creek originally was published as a young adult novel by Putnam in 1977. Told by a young man, it's the story of a family moving about in the mountain coal mining region during the Depression. The family members, by the way, are cousins of the family in Still's classic 1940 novel, River ofEarth. The new edition of Sporty Creek does four things that make it different: it adds titles to the chapters; it is called "a series of short stories" instead of a novel; it adds two chapters that appeared in River ofEarth: Chapter 1, Simon Brawl, and Chapter 5, The Force Put; it adds a host of notes to define many of the vivid Appalachian words that so 72 enrich Still's writing. Some seem fairly obvious, such as "clodhoppers," which means "cheap shoes"; but, without a note, I wouldn't know that "heat-boogers" are "visible heat waves" or that a "budget" is a "bag of personal belongings." Still said the notes are a welcome addition. "If you knew how many letters I have received over the years, especially from teachers," he said, referring to inquiries from readers about unusual words. Students should find the book especially appealing . It is not that long, it doesn't cost that much and it offers a good sample of Still's finely chiseled prose. He never uses a wasted word. Teachers who want their students to eliminate "dead wood" from their writing should point to Still as a model. Some passages are poetic in their beauty and craftsmanship. After all, Still is a sterling poet and a former state poet laureate. His simple words express his love of nature in the mountains: "The mulberries were dead ripe. They hung like caterpillars, falling at a touch. I sat high in the tree among the zizzing locusts, longing to taste the berries and watching Holly. I saw her crawl under the house. She went here and yon, and never could a body tell where." There is, of course, another side to the story: the dispiriting battle against poverty and joblessness. This, too, one finds in Sporty Creek: "The mines shut down. The operators pulled out the machinery and dismantled the tipple. Thieves stripped the copper wiring. The iron rails threading the tunnels to the coal face were removed, and all else which could be taken apart or pried loose. The scrap metal was salvaged; rusted piles of spikes, augers, discarded mine car wheels, tangles of cable. Low Glory was picked clean. Even the road into the Houndshell hollow vanished. A spring tide...