Every Leaf a Mirror: A Jim Wayne Miller Reader ed. by Morris Allen Grubbs and Mary Ellen Miller (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Every Leaf a Mirror: A Jim Wayne Miller Reader ed. by Morris Allen Grubbs and Mary Ellen Miller Nicholas Smith (bio) Morris Allen Grubbs and Mary Ellen Miller, Eds. Every Leaf a Mirror: A Jim Wayne Miller Reader. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014. 256 pages. Softcover. $30.00. Every Leaf a Mirror: A Jim Wayne Miller Reader is a collection of poetry, fiction and nonfiction that draws from Miller’s accumulated work over decades of artistic and scholarly endeavor. Skillful editing by Morris Grubbs, writer and assistant dean in the Graduate School at the University of Kentucky, and Mary Ellen Miller, the subject’s widow and a poet in her own right, places the power of Jim Wayne Miller’s writing on full display. Like many of his contemporaries in Appalachian literature, Miller had humble beginnings. Raised in the mountains of North Carolina, he grew up not knowing he lived less than fifty miles from the homeplaces of literary luminaries like Fred Chappell, Thomas Wolfe, and Wilma Dykeman. Like that of these writers before him, Miller’s work often focused on the notion of how people cope with the changing world and the underlying questions of what we hang on to, what we leave behind. This reader highlights those themes in a triad of sections divided by genre. The first, devoted to Miller’s poetry, is subdivided, with each portion exploring a different aspect of [End Page 126] his poetic themes and showcasing the range of his thought and craft, including free verse and formed poems with language as fresh as newfound words. The middle of the poetry section is devoted to Miller’s masterwork, “The Brier Sermon”. A free verse that blends styles of epic poetry with fable to achieve a parable quality, “The Brier Sermon” has itself taken on a legendary status in the Appalachian literary community. From a busy sidewalk we see the Brier use episodes including a little boy lost far from home and a hunter who walked over a cliff in an effort to urge passersby to reconsider their notion of place and belonging. He speaks freely to the changing crowd, nettling them over environmental degradation and forgetfulness of their roots while simultaneously goading them to expand their way of thinking from the old “ridge to ridge” view into a more global perspective. This candid tone is the culmination of Miller’s poetic voice and lends a raw power to the message of his sermon. The Brier convinces us that we “must be born again,” and more important, that our rebirth is not only possible but essential, inevitable. We can hang on, he says, like the scared hunter who has fallen over a cliff, or we can let go and be free, choose to return to known earth. The next section of the anthology is devoted to fiction, drawn from two novels and three short stories. Although by no means weak, this is the lesser of the three sections. The language is evocative and heavy with poetic image. Here we see most clearly reflected Miller’s abiding love and understanding of a people and place which arises only after considerable discord between a vanishing way of life and the double threat of increasing globalization and environmental destruction. Always we find ourselves returning to the theme of memory, the conflict of choosing what we will keep and what we will relinquish. [End Page 127] Despite Miller’s work being centered on belonging to a particular place, his fiction is reminiscent of immigrant stories in that even in familiar environments the characters often feel a sense of displacement. In the excerpt of “His First Best Country” we see Professor Wells—as a prosaic Brier—struggle with his own homecoming and unable to reconstruct his remembered self. He then takes to the road, and through encounters in real world places such as the Highlander Center in the mountains of Tennessee, Wells develops his perspective on what it means to be both intimate with, and simultaneously divorced from, a home. The anthology’s last section is its gem. In these essays and interview with Appalachian scholar Loyal Jones, we see Miller revealed in his...