★★★★★ 5
Fine Contemporary Poetry--Just Happens to Be Appalachian
Format: Paperback
The poems in Jesse Graves' TENNESSEE LANDSCAPE WITH BLIGHTED PINE express an indebtedness to a way of life that we contemporary Appalachians have watched transform at an accelerated pace over the past few decades, as we see the beloved old ways of our culture adapt to the demands of a society marked with the pervasiveness of media, the incursion of corporate demands, and the poignant recognition that as much as family prepares us to face the world outside our community, the impact of that world can blur the impressions our homes have made on us. Graves' work approaches these themes from various directions, as a son looking to the legacy of his family, as a youth and young man balancing education--both formal and that gleaned from personal experience--and as a family man weighing what he shares and offers in embodying those values.
In this consistently fine volume, it is difficult to select favorites, but there are "River Gods," where an inebriated student and his companion cross the high railway trestle over the Tennessee River in Knoxville, Tennessee, "Deep Corner," where the speaker contemplates how his life has turned out differently than his brother's, "Mother's Milk," where the speaker weighs how much his mother has contributed to his life (including, sweetly, "an ear for slightly off-pitch singing"), and "Digging the Pond," where the speaker and his father silently acknowledge that the son will not preserve all his father's values:
. . . I stood off to the side too often
to learn what he was born knowing.
The doing and the undoing.
I can find in his face what he reads
about the future in the tea-colored water,
his eyes and mine trying to avoid it.
Graves' love for these gifts, those accepted and those only acknowledged, resonates throughout TENNESSEE LANDSCAPE WITH BLIGHTED PINE.
Graves' appreciation for lyric poetry, his talent for finding the expressiveness of everyday language, and his offering scenes with great depth of meaning and feeling make this collection memorable, worthy of high recommendation.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2011
