Specter Mountain by Jesse Graves & William Wright

Abstract

Reviewed by: Specter Mountain by Jesse Graves & William Wright James Owens (bio) Jesse Graves & William Wright. Specter Mountain. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2018. 67 pages. Softcover. $16.00. In his poem, "How to be a Poet," Wendell Berry advises, "Stay away from anything / that obscures the place it is in." This is essential wisdom, certainly for a poet, but equally for any person or any group of people, no matter how large or seemingly powerful. A nation or a civilization is a lesser thing than the earth where it has sprung into being, and these make barely a flicker against the background of deep, geological time, though [End Page 114] lives lived firmly in place also share something of the eternal. Specter Mountain, by Jesse Graves and William Wright, speaks eloquently from inside this truth. Graves and Wright should be well-known to readers, and to readers of poetry in Appalachia, in particular. Both have already produced rich, necessary work as poets and editors, and now their collaboration is an occasion for gratitude. Specter Mountain offers many types of beauty and pleasure, including fine instances of what some of the more thoughtful recent writing on poetics means by "eco-poetry." The work of any writer associated with a particular place—whether Appalachia or the wider South or any other locale—has taken on a special urgency in recent times, when many places and the ways of life that people have invented to fit them feel the threat of change or extinction. Where resistance to these threats fail, eco-poetry must assume the unhappy work of acknowledgement and grief and warning. Many people in twenty-first century America live in the midst of things and attitudes and economic structures that, as Berry writes, "obscure" the places they are in, from the largest cities to rural areas left in pain by the disappearance of traditional ways of life with little to replace them except poverty or migration. Specter Mountain chooses not to dwell long on the already familiar consequences of living in these "desecrated places"—Berry's phrase—but when it does offer a portrait of contemporary anomie, the effect is chilling and indelible. In Specter Mountain, this can perhaps be best seen in "The Estranged," which shows us the truck-bed boys of a silent town,where violence buds in their heartslike pulsing nettles, brown calculi [End Page 115] of hard drugs knitted betweentheir teeth. They smile with a blade's exactness.Nights they piss in the gardens of strangers and light cats on fire,laugh at the pain and yowls. "This is not a fiction," the poem goes on to insist, "this is hidden / fact, the petrified senses of those / who look away for good"—that is, those who look away from the local facts of life on the mountain, in search of some illusion of "good" in a culture disconnected from the ancient and provident earth. "The Estranged" gives a reader a glimpse into a life, if we want to call it life, that is thankfully not universal in contemporary Appalachia or in other battered parts of the country, but is common enough to be recognizable for anyone who has spent much time in communities ravaged by drugs and unemployment and aimlessness. Specter Mountain is not to be found on a map, but it is still located solidly in the real world. Though Specter Mountain gathers an imposing variety of poetic forms and approaches—elegy and hymn and dream vision, ballad and confessional—its particular virtue as a book, rather than as an accumulation of individually satisfying poems, is in its understanding of scale, the meaning of the particular detail's relationship to its background. Here the experience of any poem's immediate speaker is nested inside a living, contemporary community, which is nested inside the historical process of immigration and ancestral experience of the land—and inside geological processes of formation and destruction, orogeny and the shifting of tectonic plates. The book's first poem, "Prologue," opens with a Genesis-like description of the separation of the Earth and the Moon, and [End Page 116] no poem that follows will forget its positioning on the...