Pennyroyal (review)

Abstract

are dead, are important in the life of this child whose father was killed in World War I. Snakehunter is full of interesting Whitfield characters—notably Aunt Erica, Grandpaw Clint Whitfield, and Hercules, Catherine, and Speer Whitfield. Aunt Erica, who owns the house in Century where the whole family lives, has money and political influence. Tobacco-chewing Grandpaw Clint Whitfield likes to talk about the old days during the coal boom when Century was called Hundred Mines and there were dams and locks on the river, and he pulled coal barges down the river in his own boat, the Snakehunter. Hercules, who is Speer's older cousin, is the meanest brat in the town of Century. Aunt Catherine is Speer's star relative. She shows an early interest in the boy, taking him with her to the library, letting him read while she is at work, and to the theater to see westerns and horror movies. Later, from a sanitarium, she writes in a language he cannot understand for years. In addition, he has a copy of her unsuccessful novel, in which a page index containing her symbols and archetypes was dedicated to all "Assistant Professors on the make." Speer concludes that she was a caution. The main character and narrator of Snakehunter is, of course, Speer Whitfield, a character of mythic proportions who tells us how he grew up in a diseased and dying family in a West Virginia coal town. He is always haunted by the past, though he lives on among the maimed survivors. There are other equally fascinating mountaineer characters in this novel. Read the book and discover them for yourself. I guarantee that it will evoke the Mountain State—you will savor the bittersweet taste of West Virginia. —Dexter Collett Pennyroyal. Poems by Stacy Johnson Tuthill. College Park, Md.: Scop Publications , 1991. 72 pages. $9.95. I am immediately struck by the sensory detail in Stacy Tuthill's poems, by her ability to put the reader quickly into a situation and to suggest how that moment felt, sounded, smelled, tasted. In a poem in this first collection entided "How They Felt" she recalls how, as a "skinny child . . . shivering at the heart," she listened in silence and wonder, sharing their concerns as her father and mother consoled one another during the Great Depression. The poem is representative of this entire collection, which is a sustained remembering ofparticular people, places, and moments, rendered with vividness and immediacy. Stacy Tuthill conveys the immediate feel oflife, her own as well 69 as the lives of family members, relatives, and neighbors. We are suddenly there with her in a stifling tobacco field, where tobacco leaves have "the texture/ of alligator hide" ("Green Tobacco Worms"). We hear her father's choked voice "scaly as hickory bark" ("How They Felt"); the "patrack! patrack!" of guineas ("Driving Ducks From Water"). Because she summons them up in all their vividness, we know the smell of the milking barn; the cow's breath-odor of fermenting grass; the feel of the cow's moist nose; the rattle of milk in a tin cup ("A Gift of Milk"). Again and again the author brings a moment back through some telling, authenticating detail—such as "the wheezing of his corduroy / pants" when her father walked ("Alma"). As good poets do, she gives emotion and abstractions "a local habitation and a name." Cumulatively, these poems call up the life of an entire Kentucky community with its characters and folkways. Individual poems sketch relatives, neighbors, marginal members of the community—as well as a hypocritical evangelist and a classics scholar who disports himself as an untutored mountain man. Other poems deal with traditional folkways such as shivarees, and with stories of divers who report giant catfish at the base of Kentucky Lake Dam. While other voices speak in these poems, we recognize, the more we read, that it is the poet's own distinctive voice that speaks through all the telling. Stacy Tuthill also successfully blends past and present, memory and immediate observation, as when she juxtaposes experiences in Africa in 1988 with memories of her father's concern about Mussolini in Ethiopia in 1936 ("That Flow Together...