Except
from back cover
Reading
the poems in this collection made me realize that the Appalachian
coalfields—the people who lice there and the problems they encounter—are
usually represented as small in scale and unimportant. These poems are
the first I’ve seen that make manifest the epic scale and drama of
the devastation in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. In
language that is sometimes shocking in its blunt portrayal of those
who have lived with this destruction for years, it presents the chaos
in an operatic tableau. Combining allusions to Greek myth, the
Bible and Zoroastrianism with the image of gob piles, slurry dams, the
Buffalo Creek flood and Blair Mountain, these poems connect the
mythical and sublime to a blatantly exploited people. They do so
honestly, bleakly and humorously, though with a bitter humor.
The
magnified proportions of beauty and ugliness in these poems dramatize
the worldwide importance of the economic war the working- class people
if central Appalachia are losing. Then powerful image of the huge,
earth-digging machine—the twenty-story dragline personified as
Azrael, the angel who separates the soul from the body at death—forms
a compelling emblem of this historic problem. The angel embodies
gigantic power, crippled by merciless greed, wrenching the spirit from
those who are subject to its brutality. The poems portray the
extraction of coal, especially mountaintop mining, as a struggle
between universal good and evil—Zoroastrian truth and deceit—with
nothing less than the earth and our souls at stake.
Edwina
Pendarvis
Associate Editor of the Journal for Appalachian Studies
Joint author of Human Landscapes (Bottom Dog Press, 1997)
