The Helen Poems (review)

Abstract

ideas dominated the curriculum, the staff, and the social life of the school. Alice Lloyd established the college to provide a liberal arts education for students who came from families that showed no "genetic deterioration." She did not tolerate any challenges to her vision. Occasionally, Searles makes statements that raise questions in the mind of the reader. For example: "What Caney Junior College did was to provide students with better ways to deal with change. The students did not have their own culture destroyed. They were turned into men and women who could insure their own survival." Alice Lloyd stressed the importance of students returning to the mountains and becoming agents ofchange. Although many did, were they the agents that she had hoped for? Or did the teachers become part of the mediocre, often patronage-loaded, school systems found in many parts of Eastern Kentucky ? Did the lawyers serve their communities or become part of the coal-dominated political systems? Did they measure successes in the same way that Alice Lloyd did? Searles has little to say on this. I found A College for Appalachia an enlightening book about an indomitable person who let very little stand in her way when it came to her beloved school. This is revealed by "her aggressive fund-raising, by the way she positioned her work as unique in the mountains, by the way she implicitly and explicitly called into question the value of the work performed by other groups, by her unwillingness to join with other benevolent workers in common cause, and by her sharp public criticism of denominational missionaries." Although she knew both the mountains and the mountain people well, she made use of the old stereotypes when they served her purposes. Did Searles achieve his goals? For the most part, the answer is yes. The last chapter is a fine review of Alice Lloyd's life and work in the mountains. "The college stands as living proof that the men and women who went off to do good at the turn of the century did indeed do good. We do not have to apologize for their work, nor can we denigrate it. We must accept it for what it truly was: an expression of faith ..." —Robert P. Stuckert Victor Depta.. The Helen Poems. Memphis, Tennessee: Ion Books, 1994. 86 Pages. Paperback. $12.95. Victor Depta's The Helen Poems is a sequence of lyrics in the confessional mode that, taken as a unit, form an extended, unified narrative. The story is that of a father rearing his daughter alone—a situation that is increasingly common, seldom written about, and, therefore, all the more 61 engaging. With a narrative strength sufficient to carry the reader through occasional lapses in lyrical technique, Depta's poetry does justice to this emotionally rich and troubling vein of human experience. This book begins with "Amtrak Song," which presents the departure of the mother-wife by train, leaving husband Victor standing "on the platform/in the January wind," and daughter Helen weeping, clutching at [her mother's] sleeve." The final poem, "Not Only Daughter," ends with an image of the speaker and his prayer for the girl, who has grown up and flown west to college. In between, Depta profiles the emotional challenges of single-parenting, the endless duties and responsibilities made all the more demanding by one essential difference between father and daughter: the separate experiences of the genders. The strength of this story is centered in the appeal of this most deeply human theme: the parent-child relationship. The book is made no less appealing by the development of certain predictable strains. We anticipate how Victor will handle the commonplaces of parenthood. Dominant among these is worry: worry grounded in the inherent dangers of being-in-the-world and ungrounded in his own perceived inadequacy , worry that is reasonable and worry that is not. In "The Siege of Twilight," for example, the sunset becomes "The distant armament/ on the horizon where the clouds are trenched/explodes through trees/ and strikes my daughter ..." Still more poignant are the speaker's concerns based on the fact that he is responsible for leading Helen through adolescence into young...