To Leave My Heart at Catlettsburg by Billy C. Clark (review)

Abstract

"? aim to see both someday/ I said. ? plan to. I've lived in a mine camp, but it wasn't a real town. A bunch of houses in a hollow.'" What James Still has done is to look at the people of the mountains and just a "bunch of houses in a hollow" and see a universe unto itself. Some of what happens is good, some bad. Some things there are universal; some are unique to the region. Still captures these qualities of mountain culture and renders an endearing portrait that is true to that life, and true to himself. —Art Jester Editor's Note: This article appeared earlier in the Lexington Herald-Leader as Revisiting Sporty Creek. Billy C. Clark. To Leave My Heart at Catlettsburg. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1999. 80 pages. $9.95. Paperback. This new collection of poems from Catlettsburg, Kentucky, native Billy C. Clark is part of the Jesse Stuart Foundation's commitment to reprint/publish Clark's works during this decade. Best known as a youth novelist, short story writer and favorite son of Catlettsburg, Clark's literary successes occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. His Song of the River (1957), remains a popular coming-of-age novel for youth and adult readers; and his autobiography, A Long Row to Hoe (1960), also has a popular following. Many of the major themes in Clark's previous books—the Big Sandy River, elements of nature, and family stories—are reworked as poems in To Leave My Heart at Catlettsburg. Unfortunately, Clark's overuse of rhymed sonnets and strict, metered verse impose monotony on these poems. Certainly there can be a richness and a familiarity in the tradition of metrical poems. Rhymed poetry is often invitational and pleasurable. What is generally missing in these poems, however, is invention. The rhythm is often too restrictive and contrived, and there is no discovery within the journey of the poems other than the clearly obvious. A good example would be in "Return of the Snowbirds," for instance, when the speaker observes: I have waited a summers/autumns time to see Snowbirds return to eat pecans and be Home again in my backyard and free To sing and sit there, in the pecan tree. 74 Other poems of nature or of Clark's beloved Big Sandy River bear similar construction. An overabundance of cliché, stock images, and sentimentality keep these poems from offering more than a nostalgic recollection of the poet's experiences growing up along the riverbanks in Catlettsburg. One wonders if many of these poems might not have been writing exercises, since there are some twenty similar sonnets about the river in this volume. Including all of them may be the publisher's fault, as is the lack of any central metaphor or organizing principle by which to place these poems. The collection has a random arrangement, and the poems are crowded onto the page. This slim volume (66 pages of text) contains 107 poems. The publisher has haphazardly combined all of Clark's poems, it seems, instead of the best of his work. Two narrative poems, however, stand out from the rest as memorable efforts. "Sourwood Hollow," a place that runs deep and dark in the speaker's memory, eerily gives up its ghosts of logging and mining and loss of life. "The Death ofAunt Lottie," a long poem about a blind aunt who gives the speaker her dulcimer, is reverent and musical: Breath-held I waited for her hair to catch In the dulcimer strings although it never did. She strummed with turkey quill and said to me: Lordy, Lordy, Isaac, few will ever know What company this dulcimer is to me! Lord-sent to fight this awful loneliness, Music from the heart runs down the arm, Drops from the finger tips here on the strings . . . Sadly, there are too few of these moments in this collection. Obviously these poems will nonetheless appeal to some readers in Clark's home place and can, in fact, be taken as Clark has offered them: as a gift of saved-up memories. The often strained metrical design of the majority of the poems, however, evokes greeting-card sentimentality...