Reviewed by: Driving with the Dead by Jane Hicks Erin Keane (bio) Jane Hicks. Driving with the Dead. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014. 82 pages. Softcover. $19.95. In Driving With the Dead, poet Jane Hicks’s stunning follow-up to her 2005 debut collection Blood and Bone Remember (winner of the 2006 Appalachian Book of the Year), Hicks turns her rigorous eye toward the poet’s work: “the naming of what matters.” As the title promises, the poems in Driving With the Dead are poems of loss, but Hicks has no time for maudlin remembrances, for the soft, idle elegies of the sated. Instead, Hicks settles her unflinching eye on what truly matters to her—on rural cemeteries and their specific rituals, on the [End Page 122] unraveling of marriages and of innocence, on the dead and what we owe them—with a ferocity and wit that are wholly her own. In “The Color of Loss,” an ars poetica for this collection, Hicks names an understanding of grief that is hidden yet steely, both “blackberries stored in / dark cellars” and “the shadowed eyes of the twin / who stares long into the night and waits / for his still half to speak.” But this birthright, grief, isn’t an indulgence for the poet to coddle. In the concise and determined “A Poet’s Work,” which she dedicates to a three-year-old boy killed by a strip-mine boulder that crashed the side of Black Mountain into the boy’s bedroom, Hicks lays out her demands for herself and her fellow poets: “Spare me the postmodern pout / about dog piss in the gray snow / near the subway entrance” she warns, directing their attention instead to “meth labs that spring up in our rural / gardens” and “mountaintops removed, laid low by greed, / hollows filled, wells poisoned, God’s majesty / flattened, fit only for Wal-Mart, the new Ground Zero.” Here are the fruits of “judicial disregard,” she writes, face them, travel her “ruined roads, moonscape mountains, failed farms” and confront just “how the law measures a baby’s life.” (Spoiler: as worth “less than the price / of a good pickup truck”—ponder that, academic poets preoccupied with the quality of light in a Tuscan monastery.) In another poem for the same boy, the loose sonnet “Black Mountain Breakdown,” Hicks offers a more direct elegy for the dead child. “Things rest / as we left them,” Hicks writes, in a precise explication of grief and its lingering effects, which are also made clear in Hicks’ poems about how survivors in rural communities bear the generational wounds of war. In “Draft Lottery,” Hicks takes the reader back to 1970, inside a small town’s Taco King, where a group of terrified [End Page 123] teenage employees watch the broadcast on the office TV, waiting to find out the sum of the afternoon’s reaping: “Number 22, Dennis out of school, out of options, / slid to the floor.” Hicks turns her grief for the Vietnam generation’s collective loss outward, too. In “Expatriate,” a soldier in World War II never leaves Normandy, his son and wife at home in the U.S. without a nearby grave to tend, only a telegram and “a photo of his seaside / home, manicured and maintained / by French hosts in gratitude for duty.” In “A Poet’s Work,” she calls attention to a contemporary “child who sobs silently, / her mama a nurse in the Guard, called up, / goodnights a webcam image from Basra.” Cemeteries appear frequently in this book, of course, but they’re never commonplace, and are often riddled with unsettling images—the “Beanie bears, balloons, pinwheels, / little lambs” littering the graves of children in “Kindergarten,” the ritual of homecoming picnics spread out in a rural cemetery where, distracted by a gaggle of balloons and a card meant to trace their flight, the speaker stubs her toe on the gravestone of an old boyfriend who died in Vietnam. “I retrieve the balloon card from my pocket and drive / toward the post office drop box to obey / the careful crayon message: send me back.” Throughout the collection, Hicks demonstrates that there is more than one way to tend...
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Apr 6, 2017
Nataliya Havryliuk 
