Blood And Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia

by Jane Hicks

Book by Hicks, Jane

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 2005

Reviews

[Thomas Alan Holmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been a pleasure to read Jane Hicks' Blood & Bone Remember again, particularly in recognizing how the themes she presents, defining oneself as Appalachian during a period when that regional label has transformed so quickly and often beyond our control, have as much resonance now as when she first published this collection.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Surely place induces poetry,” Eudora Welty observed, “and when the poet is extremely attentive to what is there, a meaning may even attach to his poem out of the spot on earth where it is spoken, and the poem signify the more because it does spring so wholly out of its place, and the sap has run up into it as into a tree” (On Writing, p. 48).

In this brilliant debut collection, Hicks’ poems spring so wholly out of Appalachia, evoking the blood and bone of the poet’s ancestral homelands, the stitches of handmade heirloom quilts, the briar patches on huckleberry mountains, the store of canned goods put away in the larder, the rapacious mountains that swallowed coal miners whole, the sap running up the maple shading the side yard and November washing the last leaves from the Pin Oak.

Silas House’s Introduction offers insightful commentary on several of the poems and situates Hicks’ work in the larger context of Appalachian literature.


Favorite Poems:
“Where You From, Honey?”
“Ancestral Home”
“Keeping Time”
“Country Burial”
“Pap Goes Back to Texas”
“Sorority”
“To My Welsh Ancestors”
“The Fall of the House”
“Choose Your Weapons”
“Revival”
“Sweet Savior”
“Spring, 1991: Reunion”
“Nocturne”
“Diamond Jenny #4”
“How We Became Cosmic Possums”
“Felix Culpa”
“Paradise Regained”
“A Society of Women”
“Pack Horse Librarian”
“Great Expectations”
“Deep Winter”
“Daughters of Necessity”
“First Day Photo”
“Labor Room”
“Winter Garden”

[Melissa Helton · Rating 5 out of 5]

These beautiful poems are simple and accessible, which makes them powerful, as the reader can connect their own experience to the work. It makes me want to write about the women in my family.