Sherry Chandler

Rebecca Bailey

Much Appalachian poetry tends toward the nostalgic and the defensive. How could it not, when so much has been lost? And when the region has been treated as a national joke? Still these characteristics don’t always make for good poetry.

In Meditation Upon the Invisible Ceremony of Breath (Finishing Line, 2007), Rebecca Bailey has integrated the stuff of Appalachia into a sort of New Age/age-old mysticism mixed with a mountain Zen. Her nostalgia is not just for Granny but for the granny woman: the one who delivered the babies and cured with herbs and knew a little magic, like how to remove warts or witch water. It is these women, the crone aspect of the Triple Goddess, the moon, the earth, that she reaches out for.

She remembers

…Everything imagined and unimagined,
logical and irratrional, nestled, waiting, in the crooks of
           ridges and hollows.

I remember smelling it. I smell it sometimes now.
—from “What I Learned from Grandma Bailey

The grandmother in this chapbook is an invocation of the earth spirit:

Coffee is the way to call the old gods.
Brew as black as Earth…

I call my mother’s ancestors with the patchwork quilt.
O Grandmother, put your arms around me now
and dance with me…
— from “Invocation of the Grandmother”

There is little that is gentle in Bailey’s hills, though there is wild joy:

I say I am of the ground.
I am made from no man’s rib,
but from a giant thigh of redrock
twisted into a gnarled maze indecipherable
by anything as superficial as intellect.
You have to understand rock and dirt,
ground, with the soles of your feet…
— from “Grounded”

And there is ecological disaster everywhere. As, for example, in “The Devil Comes to Rose Fork”

But then the devil came down from the ridge top,
to tap me on the shoulder
as I looked down the well box
because sludge was coming out of the faucets…

or in my favorite poem in the collection “Birth of the River God:”

He sent his maddening brown hair
across the scrappy gravels of the road
the Sunday after my father returned to earth.
His wet hair grabbed tree trunks
and swung crazily, mercilessly,
through low places. Love, he says,
is like water for it flows into the
lowest places and judges not.

Love — of place and family — is of the earth in this collection. Sorrow is of the earth. It is wild but beautiful.

1. Cat Alone and Cats in Pairs
2. Baudelaire
3. The Cat that Walked by Himself
4. More Whitman
5. The cicadas / and dry grass singing

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