Abstract
Diane Gilliam Fisher. Kettle Bottom. Florence, MA: Perugia Press, 2004. 88 pages, Paperback, $12.75. Kettle Bottom, Diane Fisher's powerful book of poems, deals with the struggles of Appalachian coal miners in the 1920s. While this has notbeen a part of life's experience for most of us, the issues it touches upon are universal. Fisher's littlebookheld me like a vise, touched me like a prayer. It made me feel like I had lived and walked with the people in its pages. The title provides an important clue to the riveting nature of these poems. "Kettle bottom" is a miner's term for petrified tree trunks buried in the mountains. A kettle bottom might weigh 200 to 300 pounds, and its location can never be predicted. When miners tunnel through and remove the surrounding material, a kettle bottom can drop through the roof of the mine crushing whoever is beneath it. Because kettle bottom accidents cannot be prevented, the coal companies are not culpable and thus can be tempted to blame underground deaths on them even when they cannot prove this cause. Thus they are symbols both of natural dangers and of coal company culpability. Fisher refers to the kettle bottom as "the guiding metaphor of the book, standing for the thing that hangs above us all, that can do us in, and that we don't have any specific knowledge of or control over." For Diane Fisher, who holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Warren Wilson College, the book grew out of a time of reconnection with her family of origin. Her mother's family was from Mingo County, West Virginia where the mine wars described in the book took place. Her father was from nearby Johnson County, Kentucky. Fisher began immersing herself in the history of coal mining in that area as well as in the language and customs, stories and people ofAppalachia. The poems in Kettle Bottom take place during 1920-21, the years of the "Matewan massacre" when Mingo County became known as "bloody Mingo." These powerful poems each speak in the voice of someone intimately connected with the mining camp: a miner, a miner's wife, a miner's child, a coal company owner, a school teacher in the company school. Fisher's acute ear for authentic turns of speech brings each voice to life. And each distinctive voice adds to the layers ofthe story until you begin to feel you are living among these people, you begin to dread the sound of the siren which means there's been another mine collapse. In the first poem, a miner's wife identifies her husband's burned body by the patch from her old blue dress with which she had mended his shirt. Fisher's ability to fathom "inside" the hearts of her characters and to connect their outward and inner lives is what touches the reader 80 so powerfully. She writes of the wives: "It is true that it is the men that goes in, but it is us that carries the mine inside." The voices of the children bring an entirely different feel to the poems, a deeply honest perspective which could be called innocent except that these children deal with an awareness of the impermanence of life and the immanence of death that threatens their innocence everyday. One of the many deeply moving poems in the book is entitled "Pearlie Tells what Happened at School." Pearlie introduces us to Walter, a little boy who has lost a beloved uncle and is struggling with his grief, searching for a way to mourn his uncle Joe who has been sealed in the mine in an accident. Having asked his teacher during a geology lesson "can a person get petrified?" Walter goes home and begins to collect rocks. The next day he brings all his rocks into the classroom and spreads them on his teacher's desk: "Walter stirs the rocks around a bit, so gentle, picks up a flat, roundish one and lays it agin his cheek. 'This here/ he says, 'is the hand.'" In the course of her research, Fisher learned that Appalachian mining communities also included immigrants and African...
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