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Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia by Jane Hicks, and: Vivid Companion by Irene McKinney (review)

These collections of poems—the former a first book, the latter the fifth volume by West Virginia's Poet Laureate—add substantially to the array of poetry published in recent years by Appalachian women writers. Jane Hicks, a native of East Tennessee, has won the Appalachian Poetry Contest sponsored by Now & Then magazine (2002) and the James Still Award for Poetry presented by the Appalachian Writers Association (2003). Although Blood and Bone Remember is her first book, she is clearly an accomplished poet, and the Jesse Stuart Foundation is to be commended for making her work more widely available. The poems in this collection, unequally divided among four titled sections, are diverse in subject matter and structure. While Hicks occasionally uses variants of such traditional forms as the sestina ("Second Semester") and the pantoum ("How We Became Cosmic Possums"), most of the poems are in free verse, often organized into stanzas of uniform lengths. The book's title announces the poet's concern with memory and the past's shaping of the present, a prominent theme in Appalachian writing. Part I, also titled "Blood and Bone Remember," contains 26 poems on a variety of topics, from such conventional Appalachian subjects as huckleberry picking and hog killing to vivid childhood memories of confrontations with an abusive father ("The Fall of the House," "Choose Your Weapons"), from celebrations of ancestors to explicitly political poems ("Spring 1991: Reunion," "Nine One One"). Part I opens with the line, "I am from the quilts I sew," and references to quilting become this book's principal unifying device, an emblem of female creativity, its communal dimension and its capacity to incorporate the past into the present: "relics, remnants, remains gathered / into beauty, pressed into utility" (25). A highly skilled quilter, Hicks transforms quilting—with what she calls its "precision and adherence to pattern" (18)—into a metaphor for poetry itself. And