Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia (review)

Abstract

Llewellyn McKernan. Many Waters: Poemsfrom West Virginia. Mellon Poetry Press, P. O. Box 450, Lewiston, NY 14092. 1993. Even though my "to do" list includes a dozen other tasks, I have read Llewellyn McKernan's book three times. Each time it has given me new pleasure. Here is a volume that looks good to the eye, feels good to the touch, sounds good to the ear. And, as if that were not enough, it sparks the imagination and stimulates the intellect. McKernan's subjects are ordinary—deceptively so. The first section, tided for the poem which is a favorite of McKernan fans, is called "The Girl in the Black Leather Raincoat," a graveside meditation that goes far beyond the grave and far beyond meditation. Included in this section is a poem about swimming in a river and one about tree stumps, but these pieces, too, go far beyond swimming and stumps. The second section contains just one long poem, "The Fast." This tightly focused piece leads the reader through a gamut of emotions from humor to pathos, all focused on a hospital patient who refuses to eat. The third section describes the seasons and natures of 4-Pole Creek. The fourth section is titled "Neighbors" and is a delightful collection of character sketches about the subjects of the poems and about the narrator-poet. The poetry of Llewellyn McKernan is three- or four- or five-dimensional. There is surface subject, and there is the poet's insight into the subject, and there is the reader's response, and there is the enrichment of literary and historical—archetypal—allusion, and there is the religious undertone established by the epigraphs. The poems reflect a tremendous variety of human experience, all the way from the "verbless" language of the Far North to the traditionalist patriarchal culture of Latin America to the unreality and lostness of big cities like New York. It is soon obvious that these experiences are being interpreted by a West Virginian poet who has her own but wonderfully Appalachian view of the world. One of the great strengths of McKernan's poetry is its imagery and metaphor. They are mixed, both in terms of the imagery being couched in metaphor and in terms of the mixing of metaphor within a poetic phrase. The latter characteristic in the hands of a less masterly writer might be a serious problem, but McKernan handles it gracefully and effectively. In fact, the mixes are just plain wonderful. Examples abound: "the moon falls like a cancerous white cell," "I pull off my lips and give them to dirt," "my daughter slips like a vow through blue water, rides a white lion that slides through her fingers . . . her glistening body a certain cloud God spins into waking and sleeping," "the nurses' rock-a-bye shoes." Granted, once in a while the mixes don't work too well, as in "ice hugging the bank lifts anchor, splintering into panes that melt and drift downstream" or as in the somewhat troublesome 71 conjunction of apparently contradictory verbs and adjectives used to describe 4PoIe Creek. This poetry is worth reading over and over. This book is a joy. —Barbara Smith Lonesome Pine Office on Youth. Looking Back: Wise County in the Early Years. Norton, Virginia: Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, 1992. 251 pages. Hardbound: $40.00. Wise County is a place where southwestern Virginia's spacious valleys penetrate the rugged Cumberland Plateau. Most of the county drains southwestward via the Powell and Clinch rivers, but northern Wise County drains to a branch of the Russell, which flows north into the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy. There the little town of Pound—the home town of U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers— nestles at the foot of Pound Gap barely three miles from Jenkins, Kentucky, on the other side of Pound Gap. South a bit along the state line, Wise County's towns of Roda and Stonega lie just over a ridge from Harlan County's town of Lynch, Kentucky. Other Wise County coal towns of that border country include Big Stone Gap, Inboden (sometimes spelled Imboden), Inman, and Pardee. From those ragged hills it seems topographical light years...