Every place has its own poetry. For some places, the poetry appears in the tones of voice between neighbors in the grocery store, or in the spirit people share when a high school football team brings them out of their houses on Friday evenings, or even through the sounds engines make as they idle in traffic on the road out of the city after a workday. The poetry of Appalachia sings in all those familiar ways, but also in the music of the particular poems collected in "The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Southern Appalachia." This anthology of contemporary poetry arrives from one of...
Every place has its own poetry. For some places, the poetry appears in the tones of voice between neighbors in the grocery store, or in the spirit peo...
"Bledsoe" is an extended narrative poem that centers on a mute Appalachian man named Durant Bledsoe. Specifically, the poem takes place in the mountains of Yancey County, North Carolina, in an early part of the 20th century. Durant Bledsoe's mother is dying with a brain tumor and he must take care of her, all the while coming to terms with the fact that she, in her suffering, has asked him to take her life. The book focuses much on landscape and on Bledsoe's complex psychology and perceptions of the world, specifically as they apply to culture, family, religion, and identity. "Rarely has a...
"Bledsoe" is an extended narrative poem that centers on a mute Appalachian man named Durant Bledsoe. Specifically, the poem takes place in the mountai...
