Driving with the Dead

Poems

Jane Hicks

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813145563
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Appalachia is no stranger to loss. The region suffers regular ecological devastation wrought by strip mining, fracking, and deforestation as well as personal tragedy brought on by enduring poverty and drug addiction. In Driving with the Dead, Appalachian poet, teacher, and artist Jane Hicks weaves an earnest and impassioned elegy for an imperiled yet doggedly optimistic people and place. Exploring the roles that war, environment, culture, and violence play in Appalachian society, the hard-hitting collection is visceral and unflinchingly honest, mourning a land and people devastated by economic hardship, farm foreclosures, and mountaintop removal.

With empathy and a voice of experience, Hicks offers readers a poignant collection of poems that addresses themes of grief and death while also illustrating the beauty, grace, and resilience of the Appalachian people. Invoking personal memories, she explores how the loss of physical landscape has also devastated the region's psychological landscape.

Graphic, bold, and heartfelt, Driving with the Dead is an honest and compelling call to arms. Hicks laments the irreplaceable treasures that we have lost but also offers wisdom for healing and reconciliation.

Contents

Foreword by George Ella Lyon

Summer Rain

What Matters

Walking Boundaries

A Transplant Leaves Minnesota, 1973

The Ryman Auditorium, 1965

Roy

Poor Valley Pilgrims

Revelation

Draft Lottery

North Fork of the Holston, 1962

Black Mountain Breakdown

The Color of Loss

Expatriate

Lietuva

Kindergarten

Color

Leavings

Drive by Slowly

Glitter

Jones and Thomason, General Merchandise

My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Gerard Manley Hopkins

Close Order

The Missionary

The Grace of Risen Dough

Domestic Arts

My Grandmother Escapes

New Testament

Dismissal

Mordant

Cousins

Tonic

The Big Beautiful

Commencement Day, 2005

A Poet’s Work

James Still Leaves Wolfpen

Driving with the Dead

Dust

Hunkering Down

Bluegrass Festival

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index of First Lines

Foreword

The title of Jane Hicks’s second collection puts you on notice that you’re about to read a book about loss. What it doesn’t tell, however, is what distinguishes these poems: the lessons and wisdom the poet reckons from that loss.

Hicks clearly declares her purpose in “A Poet’s Work”: “the naming of what matters.” Hers is not art for art’s sake. She speaks out of the pain of the moment—meth labs, farm foreclosures, mountains devastated, mothers leaving for war. She also speaks against the greed at its root.

Fiercely set in Appalachia, these poems claim personal and cultural history, even as they speak out against forces that threaten both. “North Fork of the Holston 1962” evokes the river as Daniel Boone, the Cherokee, and A. P. Carter knew it, as well as the “green history” Hicks fished in as a child. But her gaze is not nostalgic. She goes on to name the businesses that have poisoned the Holston: Olin Saltworks, Eastman Chemical, Bemberg Rayon.

She takes Big Coal to task in two poems dedicated to Jeremy Davidson, the three-year-old crushed by a boulder that broke loose from an illegal strip mine operation and crashed through the roof while he slept. Similarly, she names those traveling with her who were lost to war: ancestors in the Great War and World War II, friends in Vietnam, folks called up by the National Guard today. Hicks cannot ignore “death’s grotesque planting” and its harvest.

But the world in these poems is not without joy. In “What Matters,” Hicks catalogs pleasures from country ham to “flannel sheets,” from “rusty dogwood” to “my chair near yours, a good poem.” And always in her world, there is music. In “Poor Valley Pilgrims,” she narrates the Carter Family’s journey to make their first recording; “jolted,” “rattled,” “desperate,” and “soggy,” they come “to score/the soundtrack of a nation.” She glories in the “acoustic paradise” of “The Ryman Auditorium, 1965,” where Mother Maybelle pulls her back to the heritage she was ready to throw off in favor of Elvis and the Beatles. In that moment, she is repatriated.

What she says outright in “A Transplant Leaves Minnesota, 1973,” is a characteristic gesture of this collection:

I gleaned the remains of my life, turned toward the hills
that give me help, give me shelter,
hold the sky where it belongs.

With her grandmother’s blood strong in her veins, her role as poet/seer affirmed by teacher and tradition, Jane Hicks speaks out for what matters most in “praise and remembrance.”

George Ella Lyon

Driving with the Dead

Summer Rain

for Ron Rash

The second Sunday in July marks homecoming

at Pine Grove Freewill Baptist, celebrated not with football

and marching bands, but dinners on the ground

among our departed and a background of good gospel music,

down-home food, and talk of recipes, quilts, and bloodlines.

After a pooling of memory, my great aunts send me

to the old cemetery, where my great-great-grandfather rests

under an odd knob of quartz in a portion of graves marked with crude stones

beneath a row of ancient oaks that whisper and jostle in the breeze.

Out of the shade, in the heat of the new grounds marked

with flat bronzes, silk flowers, and American flags,

I see the stir and bob of balloons, and walk to where they lift and settle,

a chain of them, a card tied to the string to trace flight,

attract friends in far-flung places.

I stoop to retrieve the card, stub my toe upon my youth,

see the carved name of love that tasted of lake water and Juicy Fruit

on a blanket weighted with battered Keds and penny loafers.

A ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Summer Rain
• What Matters
• Walking Boundaries
• A Transplant Leaves Minnesota, 1973
• The Ryman Auditorium, 1965
• Roy
• Poor Valley Pilgrims
• Revelation
• Draft Lottery
• North Fork of the Holston, 1962
• Black Mountain Breakdown
• The Color of Loss
• Expatriate
• Lietuva
• Kindergarten
• Color
• Leavings
• Drive by Slowly
• Glitter
• Jones and Thomason, General Merchandise
• My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Close Order
• The Missionary
• The Grace of Risen Dough
• Domestic Arts
• My Grandmother Escapes
• New Testament
• Dismissal
• Mordant
• Cousins
• Tonic
• The Big Beautiful
• Commencement Day, 2005
• A Poet’s Work
• James Still Leaves Wolfpen
• Driving with the Dead
• Dust
• Hunkering Down
• Bluegrass Festival
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index of First Lines
• Kentucky Voices