Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

I picked this up for much the same reason I picked up Communion: I already admired bell hooks' work, and I remain mildly motivated by spite whenever I see certain public figures becoming associated with ideas and places that deserve a broader range of voices.

That said, I am a far bigger admirer of hooks' essays than her poetry. This is less a criticism of the collection than an acknowledgment that poetry is one of the few genres where I am both unusually picky and difficult to impress.

Even so, I found much to appreciate here. The poems are rooted in place, memory, and belonging, and they engage with Appalachia in a way that feels humane and attentive rather than reductive. One of the collection's strengths is its refusal to flatten the show more region into either stereotype or mythology. That alone makes it more thoughtful than many discussions of Appalachia that reach a wider audience (like some other elegy of Appalachian "hillbillies".. *cough cough) .

While this did not resonate with me as deeply as hooks' nonfiction, I still found it rewarding and worthwhile. Readers who are more receptive to poetry than I am may well connect with it even more strongly. show less

Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place by bell hooks starts with a beautiful cover of tobacco drying in the barn that took me home to the tobacco farm where I grew up. I really enjoyed the way hooks used sparse language to paint a vivid picture of abundance and need. Appalachian Elegy explores the effects of reverence and greed on lives, culture, and land. Hooks leaves little unturned in the fields and hills of Kentucky while exploring history, the present, and even possible futures based on decisions made. Appalachian Elegy combines celebration of the land with mourning the losses people create, as a good elegy does.

I had no idea bell hooks wrote poetry.

How glad am I to discover she does?

This slim little volume is about place, identity, belonging, coming home and all the emotional turmoil and joy that comes with it. What I adore about hooks' writing in this volume is how articulate she is. She is so precisely able to express herself and her thoughts.

When I read her writing, particularly her essays, I feel like she has said exactly what she needs to say and used the right number of words doing so. It's not like with Hemingway, where his writing is sparse and minimalist and bare. hooks writes with so much purpose that I feel it tangibly when she puts pen to paper.

As to the actual poems, I loved so many of them. They were full of beautiful (if show more painful) metaphors about loss, land, freedom, blackness, ownership and all of the above. I feel that I preferred her poems when they were steeped more in metaphor and not necessarily so explicit about, for example, slavery.

I felt that the intertwining of the environment and the discussion of the history of Kentucky made her poems what they were. I didn't want her to tell me the history, I wanted her to show me.

I'll leave you with a poem of hers, so that you may decide for yourself if you'd like to read it.

3.
night moves
through thick dark
a heavy silence outside
near the front window
a black bear
stamps down plants
pushing back brush
fleeing manmade
confinement
roaming unfettered
confident
any place can become home
strutting down
a steep hill
as though freedom
is all
in the now
no past
no present show less

The redoubtable bell hooks, known for her work on race and feminism, also writes poetry. I vaguely think I knew that. I recently found out that hooks wrote one of the earliest books on teaching children who black, poor and left behind. What I didn’t know was that bell hooks was born and raised in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. I also assumed that she, like me, was a creature of the asphalts. (I’m a New Yorker now living in Louisville, Kentucky.) How wrong I was!

I stumbled on hooks’ Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place while trying to find a copy of her seminal book on education, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. How exciting to check the Kindle edition out of the library!

hooks’ introduction proved as lyrical show more as the rest of her work that I’ve read. Here’s an excerpt that revealed, in part of a single paragraph, how Gloria Jean Watkins of segregated, rural Kentucky became the iconoclastic bell hooks.

All backwoods folks were poor by material standards; they knew how to make do. They were not wanting to tame the wildness, in themselves or nature. Living in the Kentucky hills was where I first learned the importance of being wild.

Yet, too many of the poems that follow that sparkling introduction just say nothing, lacking the passion of hooks’ other work. The poems are numbered rather than titled, and numbers 9, 15, 23, 37, 40, 41, 46, 52, 54, 55, and 63 blazed, as you’d expect from the fiery bell hooks. The rest? Meh.

Please allow me to end this review with my favorite poem from this slender volume of verse. Would that there had been more of this caliber!

15.
pink and white oleander
not native to Appalachian ground
still here lies
years and years of poison
rebel flags
heritage and hate
in the war to fight hunger and
ongoing loss
there are no sides
there is only
the angry mind of hurt
bringing death too soon
destroying all our dreams
of union

show less

I have read just a few of bell hooks other works in the past and assumed she was strictly a non-fiction writer, so I was pleasantly surprised to see her name in a search for poetry on my library's ebook site. This was a quick but powerful read, with evocative imagery that conveys the idea of feeling connected to the land you live on despite its bloody and cruel history

I picked this up in part because the author spoke recently on campus, plus she is teaching here now. However, I also picked it up curious because the book's poems look at Appalachia, an area where I live now, so I wanted to learn a bit more. bell hooks' poetry looks at the landscape, the people, its tense history, the seasons, the coal miners, and more. The poems are short, but they are very evocative and moving at times. The author brings a lot of her personal experience as a Kentucky native to her poetry as well. It is a book I highly recommend.

This absolutely did not work for me. There was no celebration of language or experimentation of form. Only by really focusing on the images she build did I get much out of this at all. I know other folks who have really loved this, but it was not for me.