All my people

Marianne Worthington is a woman of diminutive stature but expansive spirit, especially when it comes to her Appalachian roots. In her Finishing Line chapbook Larger Bodies than Mine, she explores those roots. The dedication to “all my people” takes in her kin in their sorrow, their pain, their human failings.

Women seem compelled to write poems about their grandmothers. I have written a fair number of them myself. Such writing, such remembering, is a way of honoring legacy. But, because grandmother poems are so common, they are very difficult to write. In inexperienced hands, grandmother poems risk cliché and sentimentality. Sentimentality is not to be confused with sentiment. Skilled craftswomen may rely on sentiment, a strategy Annie Finch would champion, but the line is thin.

So sure is Worthington’s craft, so strong her intelligence, that her grandmother poems sing us a new song of an old relationship. Worthington is fearlessly honest and without a trace of sentimentality:

Reading My Grandmother’s Diary

I believe her faith was clichéd
built on evangelists’ tracts and radio
sermons, the words on the air dropping
like sharp pebbles, pitting her wrists
and ankles where she tied herself
to the bed each morning unable to rise.
her mind picking its way through

another bitter day.

Though sometimes her vision is gentler and does partake of sentiment:

Porcelain

I wash Grandmother’s Japanese china,
a pattern with such an old fashioned name:
Arlene.

“Porcelain” is one of three unrhymed sonnets in the chapbook. They are my favorites in this 29-page collection. Worthington might be deemed a semi-formal poet. She uses a loose sonnet form but most of her poems are free verse, long of line and boxy in shape but with a strong underlying rhythms. Worthington is a scholar of traditional mountain music, and her immersion in music has influenced her poetic line.

The central portion of the book is devoted to poems about Father, including my favorite of the sonnets:

For the Young Girl Who Lost Her Father

I would not give him back to you, your father
as a healthy man. He would change who you
became. Instead I wuld give back your summers . . .

It is always a mistake to conflate the poetic voice with the poet, and Worthington is at work at a series of dramatic monologues about women in the early years of country-music radio. So she is known to take on a persona. Still, there is a strong autobiographical feel to this chapbook, a feel of honoring the past by looking at it with clear eyes.

I think Jeff Daniel Marion got it right in his cover blurb:

Haunted by the past, the poems in Larger Bodies Than Mine are incantations, spells changed with the hope of striking a balance in a world of struggle and suffering. In the face of brokenness and shattered remnants of lives, the poems themselves redeem loss and long for wholeness. Here is a strong and steady voice worthy of our hearing.

Larger Bodies Than Mine was given the Appalachian Book of the Year award in poetry for 2007.