Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets

by Jennifer Horne (Editor)

Finalist for the SIBA Book Award

A loamy volume of verse thematically inspired, Working the Dirt celebrates Southerners' connections to the land. The selected poems share themes of gardening, farming, and the rich Southern soil. The approximately one hundred poets, known and lesser-known, living and dead, Fred Chappell, Walter McDonald, A. R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, Wendell Berry, Henry Taylor, Tom Dent, Jesse Stuart, Jim Wayne Miller, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Marion Montgomery, James Whitehead, C. D. Wright, George Scarbrough, Ahmos Zu-Bolton II, Thad Stem, Jr., William Sprunt, Donald Justice, Thomas Rabbitt, James Dickey, Rick Lott, John Allison, Edwin Godsey, Richard Jackson, Nikki Giovanni, Alvin Aubert, Margaret Walker, Emily Hiestand, Robert Gibbons, John Stone, Coppie Green, Bonnie Roberts, Coleman Barks, Anne George, Edward Eaton, Margaret Gibson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jack Butler, R. H. W. Dillard, Jane Gentry, Rodney Jones, Dannye Romine, Miller Williams, George Garrett, Sandra Agricola, Patricia Hooper, Gerald Berrax, Gibbons Ruark, Catherine Savage Brosman, Loretta Cobb, and Pattiann Rogers.

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

About the author

Jennifer Horne is a writer, editor, and teacher who grew up in Arkansas and has lived for many years in Alabama. Her book Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets (2003) brought together over 100 poems about farming and gardening in the South. Her two co-edited books (with Wendy Reed), All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (2006) and Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (2012), have received acclaim for the high quality of the essays and their contribution to discussions about religion and spirituality in the American South. Her most recent book, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower (2014) is a collection of loosely interwoven stories in the voices of southern women and girls of different ages and backgrounds. Bottle Tree (2010) is a book of poems focusing on Horne’s experiences as a southern woman; her second collection of poems, Little Wanderer, a collection of road and travel poems, will be published this summer by the Irish publisher Salmon Poetry. She is currently working on a poetry chapbook, a new collection of short stories, and a memoir-influenced book about Scott and Zelda biographer Sara Mayfield.

Reviews

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly, my favorite poems in this collection are ones about grandmothers. I’m glad to be reminded how very much I enjoy Robert Morgan’s poetry. And I’m so glad to have been introduced to Nikki Giovanni’s “ A Theory of Pole Beans,” which I had not read before.

[Dianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even if you don't regularly search out Anthologies of Southern Poetry, this one you would probably enjoy. It's sometimes about dirt, sometimes about beans and seasons and times and places and lives. It's simple, plain spoken and sometimes pretty real. These poets are, like most, not shy. The editor did a wonderful job of collecting poets and prose that just fit together in a "non-matchy" way. And if you do it right, you can hear the rain splat and fall, smell the turned earth as you turn the pages.

[Michelle Smart · Rating 3 out of 5]

A couple stand-outs, but mostly I was left unsatisfied, hoping for that perfect poem along this theme that would speak to me.