Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia by Jane Hicks, and: Vivid Companion by Irene McKinney (review)

Abstract

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Reviews Jane Hicks. Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2005. 78 pages, Paperback, $10.00. Irene McKinney. Vivid Companion. Morgantown, WV: Vandalia Press, 2004. 98 pages, Paperback, $16.50. These collections of poems—the former a first book, the latter the fifth volume by West Virginia's Poet Laureate—add substantially to the array of poetry published in recent years by Appalachian women writers. Jane Hicks, a native of East Tennessee, has won the Appalachian Poetry Contest sponsored by Now & Then magazine (2002) and the James Still Award for Poetry presented by the Appalachian Writers Association (2003). Although Blood and Bone Remember is her firstbook, she is clearly an accomplished poet, and the Jesse Stuart Foundation is to be commended for making her work more widely available. The poems in this collection, unequally divided among four titled sections, are diverse in subject matter and structure. While Hicks occasionally uses variants of such traditional forms as the sestina ("Second Semester") and the pantoum ("How We Became Cosmic Possums"), most of the poems are in free verse, often organized into stanzas of uniform lengths. The book's title announces the poet's concern with memory and the past's shaping of the present, a prominent theme in Appalachian writing. Part I, also titled "Blood and Bone Remember," contains 26 poems on a variety of topics, from such conventional Appalachian subjects as huckleberry picking and hog killing to vivid childhood memories of confrontations with an abusive father ("The Fall of the House," "Choose Your Weapons"), from celebrations of ancestors to explicitly political poems ("Spring 1991: Reunion," "Nine One One"). Part I opens with the line, "I am from the quilts I sew," and references to quilting become this book's principal unifying device, an emblem of female creativity, its communal dimension and its capacity to incorporate the past into the present: "relics, remnants, remains gathered / into beauty, pressed into utility" (25). A highly skilled quilter, Hicks transforms quilting—with what she calls its "precision and adherence to pattern" (18)—into a metaphor for poetry itself. And 73 when she turns in Part IV to the three figures she terms "Daughters of Necessity," she invokes the three Fates of classical mythology, themselves linked to weaving as a variation on quilting. Parts ILTV all illustrate one of the major strengths of this collection: Hicks's ability to create a range of first-person voices beyond her own. Part II consists of seven numbered "Diamond Jenny" poems, each of them detailing lives affected by coal mining, the first two those of a miner's wife and daughter, respectively. As readers eventually become aware, the numbers in these titles refer not to the varied experiences of one person but to the experiences of several people at separate mines, all with the same name—a discovery that has the effect of multiplying exponentially the dangers and deaths these poems record. In the four Cosmic Possum poems of Part III, Hicks deals less with distinctively "other" voices than with an alter ego, as Jim Wayne Miller did through his persona the Brier. Hicks defines the term "Cosmic Possums" as "Suburban Appalachian Baby Boomers" and playfully describes them as follows: Caught between Country Club and 4-H, Neither shrimp nor crawdad, Neither hip nor hillbilly, Neither feedsack nor cashmere (52). This persona enables Hicks to reflect both humorously and satirically on Appalachian identity in transition. Among this volume's most powerful poems are those Hicks attributes to her "Daughters of Necessity": Cassandra, Thalia, and Lydia, representatives of earlier generations of Appalachian women. The Greek Cassandra was a prophetess fated not to be believed; Hicks's Cassandra, condemned by her preacher for bearing an out-ofwedlock child, finds herself in the poem "Felix Culpa" "blessed by loving, not damned" (60). Thalia, named for one of the three Graces as well as the Greek Muse of comedy and pastoral poetry, is a rural librarian who delivers books by pack horse—and also serves as a midwife. And Lydia, who celebrates her "morning of creation" in "Labor Room" and speaks of "keep[ing] company with the Fates" as a girl (74), returns the reader to...