Sherry Chandler

Steve Holt

Czeslaw Milosz, in his essay “Ruins and Poetry,” from The Witness of Poetry (Harvard 1983), said this:

After the war the annihilation of the Polish Jews appears in the poems of several writers, some of which found their place in anthologies. But, applying severe criteria, one can say that the subject is beyond the authors’ capabilities and rises up before them like a wall. The poems are considered good primarily because they move us with their noble intentions.

While the troubled history of Appalachians is in no way comparable to the Holocaust, I sometimes think that it presents the same kind of problem for its poets. As Milosz says earlier in the same essay:

Noble intentions should be rewarded …[but] some detachment, some coldness, is necessary to elaborate a form. People thrown into the middle of events that tear cries of pain from their mouths have difficulty in finding the distance necessary to transform this material artistically. …The tortures of the damned in Dante’s Inferno were, after all, invented by the author, and their fictitious character is made apparent by form.

It’s a problem I’ve raised here before: The combination of atrocity, personal or social, and free verse can sometimes seem sensationalist; the combination of atrocity and form can seem cold and artificial.

So I was delighted to find Stephen M. Holt’s Elegy for September (March Street Press, 2007) in my mailbox last week.

Steve Holt is one of Kentucky’s best-kept secrets. He tells me he does not consider himself strictly an Appalachian poet and yet he is of Appalachia, writing out of its landscape and its history. In Holt’s hands, the matter of Appalachia is not so much the focus as the metaphor. Take, for example:

Sometimes I Lived In the Country

Fresh from the Saar campaign, my father
felled a diseased elm, by sundown
he sat on its massive trunk and rolled a smoke.

Crayfish coned the meadow bogs, withered
grasshoppers fled the stench of scorched fields.
Sweet corn bled from the cobs, pole beans snapped.

Mines in the mountains closed, men cried
holy unto an angry god and hellfire
roared from potbellied stoves come winter.

This short poem paints a time, a place, a man in a few quick strokes. It asserts its lyric bona fides beginning with Huddy Ledbetter’s “Good Night Irene” and ending with the traditional gospel tune (beloved of Bluegrass musicians) “Crying Holy Unto the Lord.” It places us in World War II with Patton’s army rolling through Germany in the Saar campaign that took five cities in 48 hours but stalled at the Maginot Line.

It gives us Dutch Elm Disease, drought, famine, the end of the wartime mining boom. It also gives us, in that final image of the diseased elm or the hard-mined coal burning like hellfire, the Holocaust. Or, for that matter, the atomic bomb. The whole destructive history of the 20th Century distilled to 9 lines, focussed on Appalachia but resonating outward.

In these sometimes deceptively quiet poems, Holt charts a course from the Shawnee to the New South, from Lavisa Fork to Connemara. I think you’ll find it worth your while to spend time with these well-honed lyrics.

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