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mickeymole's review
5.0
Back in 2005, my Poetry professor and friend, Dick took me to a reading at a community college in Virginia to hear this Rash guy do a reading. I'd never heard of him, but Dick said I'd love him. What I found was a treasure. Ron Rash is one of our best writers. Not only does he write wonderful poetry, but he's a very fine novelist. Can't say enough good things about this author. Meeting this lovely human being, and hearing that comforting Southern accent was almost like coming home again.
dtpsweeney's review
4.0
Adjectives that come to mind describing the world of this poetry in western Appalachian North Carolina: unforgiving, cold, indifferent, ruthless, severe, barren, and somehow still painfully loved and familiar. This poetry is about the hardship of a place, and yet it is also clearly Home to its poet. Some of these poems are staggeringly powerful, especially the ones about old towns and homes that have been flooded to the bottoms of lakes by dam & reservoir construction projects (a niche topic that I also write & think about a lot — this is the only time I have encountered writing on this subject by someone else, which was incredible and surprising and instructive).
As someone who has now read a fair amount of Ron Rash, it was really incredible to recognize that some of these early poems evolved into full short stories that were published years later in his collections “Burning Bright” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Reading these poems felt like discovering a prequel that I didn’t know existed before, and it was amazing to see how those beloved stories had unspooled from such compact origins. The fact that many of these poems could easily become full stories speaks to the narrative quality of Rash’s poems.
One substantial drawback that I will mention is my discomfort with how certain groups of people are identified and framed. In two poems, Rash writes of indigenous peoples of western North Carolina as “vanquished” and “vanished,” neither of which are acceptable or accurate terms to describe a living culture that has survived a genocide perpetrated by the people Rash writes about and comes from (hmm). He also uses “a col—ed” to describe a black neighbor in one poem, which I think was intended to date the poem (they are narrated from various times over the past three centuries) but which still felt like a weak and inappropriate artistic choice. I would happily scrap those three poems from an otherwise really strong collection, and I wish he hadn’t included them because they tarnish the rest imo.
As someone who has now read a fair amount of Ron Rash, it was really incredible to recognize that some of these early poems evolved into full short stories that were published years later in his collections “Burning Bright” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Reading these poems felt like discovering a prequel that I didn’t know existed before, and it was amazing to see how those beloved stories had unspooled from such compact origins. The fact that many of these poems could easily become full stories speaks to the narrative quality of Rash’s poems.
One substantial drawback that I will mention is my discomfort with how certain groups of people are identified and framed. In two poems, Rash writes of indigenous peoples of western North Carolina as “vanquished” and “vanished,” neither of which are acceptable or accurate terms to describe a living culture that has survived a genocide perpetrated by the people Rash writes about and comes from (hmm). He also uses “a col—ed” to describe a black neighbor in one poem, which I think was intended to date the poem (they are narrated from various times over the past three centuries) but which still felt like a weak and inappropriate artistic choice. I would happily scrap those three poems from an otherwise really strong collection, and I wish he hadn’t included them because they tarnish the rest imo.
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