Karen Blomain (1944–2012)

A collection of works by several authors, including Jay Parini, W. S. Merwin, and Gerald Stern. The "anthracite region" covers a lot of territory through parts of seven counties in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania, but the experience of working the deep mines and living in company towns was much the same everywhere. Dirty, dangerous, stifling and dehumanizing. The subject matter doesn't seem to lend itself to poetic treatment. These poems are fascinating, evocative, but almost every one of them would work better for me if it weren't posing as verse. As usual, though, one or two stand out. This fragment of "Walking the Anthracite" by Harry Humes, will stay with me:

"It could be the rim of the world,
the rocks breathing summer,
the copperheads coiled brilliant
near the huckleberry bushes.”

And this image from "My Mother at Evening" (also by Humes) cannot be improved upon:

“…at the end of his shift
he’d come up from the pit in the gunboat,
face black, lips and tongue pink as her peonies,
and not stopping at the washroom,
walk down to the railroad tracks
and wait for a train to hop.”

When we were in college, my husband and I took a course in folklore; as his final project, my husband collected oral histories from people in his hometown who remembered the mining days. These poems reminded me of that project, which I hadn't thought about for years, and one of the most "poetic" of the works in Coalseam, "Making Soap" by Nancy Deisroth, could have been transcribed verbatim from one of my husband's old interview tapes. It has the perfect speech rhythm of an old woman explaining how she made her own strong soap from lye and bacon fat. Impossible to take a piece of it out as a sample---it needs to be read entire, preferably aloud.

Review written March, 2009… (mehr)