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JOHN W. MCCAULEY, ED. KENTUCKY IS MY HOME: A JOURNEY INTO THE LIFE OF JESSE HILTON STUART.
ASHLAND KY: JESSE STUART FOUNDATION, 2025. 236 PP. $30.
In 1966, seven poets, including Jesse Hilton Stuart, the 1954 Kentucky Poet Laureate, founded the Kentucky State Poetry Society. Next year we will celebrate the Society’s sixtieth anniversary. Now comes a book featuring new poems by Stuart; that is, mostly unpublished poems new to the reading public, arranged, edited, and, in some instances titled, by John McCauley, a member of the Jesse Stuart Foundation’s Board of Directors.
In her foreword, Edwina Pendarvis celebrates the accessibility of Stuart’s poetry and links him, through his emphasis on nature, to the Romantics and the American Transcendentalists, as well as to poets of place like Robert Frost; and, through Stuart’s pioneering work in depicting his beloved Appalachia positively—especially his home turf of W-Hollow in Greenup County–to Identity Poetry that explores the influence of one’s culture on a sense of self.
McCauley went through many boxes of Stuart’s writing in the Jesse Stuart Foundation archives to find these poems. He learned to read Stuart’s “hieroglyphic penmanship” and figured out his writing process. He wrote poems about Stuart, which open and close the collection. Dr. James Gifford, Foundation CEO, provided crucial support.
In his Introduction, McCauley lists three major finds from his research: a 32-page poem, “Ascension of Autumn,” in Stuart’s handwriting; a 22-page poem, “My Land Has a Voice;” and a sequence of 22 stretched sonnets. Some of these last had been published, but not in Stuart’s final order or with his titles. The collection also includes 33 other unpublished poems, a mountain ballad, and seven of Stuart’s well-known poems.
In “Ascension of Autumn,” the poet walks the hills, personally claiming every inch:
“Stranger,” I say, “this is my land here,
Land of my father’s father,
Land of my mother’s father,
Land of our living not our dead.
…….
This is my land, my life is here,
And loves are here,
……….
My neighbors, friends, they are my loves—
Their flesh is mine and their blood is mine,
And all our flesh and blood are of our own
And good Kentucky earth.”
This may sound sentimental, but Stuart, a seventh-generation Kentuckian, earned the right to such feelings by his deep knowledge of, and lifelong emotional commitment to, the place. Many stanzas read like desperate catalogues of everything he knows about the hills, as if he is driven by the threat of change and his own mortality to record all before it, and he, disappear:
The crow, the bat, the kildee, and
The quail, rabbit, pole-cat, possum,
The raccoon, groundhog, and squirrel.
All are my loves: wonderful blacksnakes,
The mean copperhead, and the pretty green snake The sonnet “This Poet Sings” closes soberly, “This poet sings but not for evermore.”
Stuart’s family is often celebrated. “Our Model Appalachian Mother” begins
Born of a durable strong mountain woman,
A mother with an active brain and heart.
Five feet eleven and with more strength than
My father, she showed us working was an art.
“Together,” another stretched sonnet, is addressed to his wife Naomi Deane. Again, he is on the move, and concerned with last things:
We journey on not knowing where it ends.
Enduring love, born new each day we march
Together under heaven’s high blue arch.
The many passages and whole poems about the seasons amplify the elegiac. “Winter’s Warning” ends,
No use to weep for days we can’t recall
For they lie buried under dead leaf pall.
The question arises with posthumously published work: would the author have wanted these pieces published? Were they held back for a reason? We will never know. Are the poems in Section VI of the book, Jesse Stuart Classics, tighter and more
“finished” than some of the newly discovered ones? Yes, but each poem here contributes to a portrait of the poet.
This collection is an important addition to Stuart studies. Photographs of Stuart and his family, as well as of manuscript drafts, illustrate his autobiographical touchstones. Though Stuart traveled widely, like fellow author and friend James Still, being of these hills, he could not pass beyond; nor did he ever want to, in his heart. As I read these poems, I imagined how much Stuart, Frost, and Thoreau would have enjoyed roaming the Kentucky hills together, discussing farming methods and every little plant and critter they came across.
Hansel’s brave singing about dark times is a must read and a crucial public service.
CHRISTOPHER MCCURRY, THE GOSPEL OF GOD BOY.
LEXINGTON KY: ACCENTS PUBLISHING. 2025. 77PP. $19. COVER ART BY SIGRID THALER.
The cover of Christopher McCurry’s second poetry collection features an expressionistic painting of a multi-colored human head and shoulders. A black, featureless head floats in front of it. Below, on the body, are two shadowy, younger heads: one light, one dark. These pairings point to pairings in the poems: the conscious mind and its shadow self, to use Jung’s term; two brothers in a difficult relationship; a mother and father and the speaker’s relationship to each; and his relationship with God. And what of the word “Godboy?” Its shadow self could be “good boy,” perhaps ironic; or slang for a someone who’s too goody goody; or the aspirational “godly boy;” or perhaps “son of God,” or a synonym for “egotist.” Public and private selves.
The groupings of the poems and the section titles support an overall narrative occurring within a Biblical frame. Genesis 4:13—“And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear,” precedes the first poem, “3 & 5,”one of several whose titles give the ages of the brothers. It relates the earliest attempt of one brother to murder the other
in a grocery store
parking lot,
while momma
buys a week’s worth of eggs
and bread.
Because where else do family conflicts happen, but in ordinary, everyday locations? In McCurry’s poetry, the mundane is the road to understanding. The funny-wistful prose poems in Genesis, the first section, for example, explain “Why I Can’t Take My Mother Out to Dinner” through the small aggravations family members inflict on each other: “She’s got a flat tire. She’s got a dead battery. She thought by now I would have wondered why she hadn’t shown up, been worried.”
In the three sections titled Gospel, Godboy makes his way in the world—learning to shave, falling in love, becoming a parent, interrogating his relationship with divinity. “Godboy Spends 4 Days Without His Phone,” alternates meaningless activity and prayer:
Father, I’m going to sparkle for you. Zip around
and tempt your sceptered hand
to snatch me up and put me to work
as symbol of your sovereignty. Father.
The Prophecies section concerns teaching. (McCurry is the 2021 Kentucky High School Teacher of the Year.) Most of these poems are about student tragedies and their unpredictability. In “Why Now I Do Not Refrain,” a child shoots another child. So, the teacher explains,
Now I do not refrain from offering
to each new student a chance
to feel another human who’s
soft with love.
Apocrypha introduces a “Storm God,” recalling flood times in Kentucky. In “The Bringer of Rain Makes a House Call,” She’s aware that merciful gods
are not remembered for long. She drowns pets, rips out homes.
The poems in Revelations indict our all-too-human inhumanity, building to the nightmare imagery of “Colony Collapse,” in which The sun will not even stand our presence.
It hates us more than we hate ourselves.
But the most powerful section may be A Parable of Two Brothers, which picks up where “3 & 5” left off and follows the brothers into their fifties. Finally, the source of mutual hatred comes down to
half a century’s worth of hating
how much
of you was me and loving
how much of me
was you.
Each the shadow self of the other. The single poem that forms the Epilogue, “Godboy Smells Like His Dad,” doubles down on the specificity of the senses, the origin of so much of our lofty thoughts and feelings. This powerful, brave collection speaks to the bruised, questioning heart in all of us.
KEVIN NANCE, SMOKE.
LEXINGTON KY: ACCENTS PUBLISHING. 2025. 89PP. $19.
Smoke: What does the word evoke for you? Fire, evanescence, danger, beauty, cigarettes, tobacco, pleasure, clouds, evanescence, fall, winter, obfuscation, death . . . It’s all here. In the title poem, smoke is tricky: “It gets in your eyes,” or it “sits on your chest & steals your breath like a cat;” or sometimes it’s “neighborly,” when it isn’t being sinister: “a ghost tongue uncoiling like a dancing snake” or a funeral wreath circling your head. It’s a lot like life, in fact, in this compelling collection, whose smoky themes span a lifetime.
In “First Light,” the initial poem,
a boy is dreaming of his mother & father
standing in a field of tobacco,
growing smaller & smaller
because he already knows he will leave their hard life, which is described in “Gathering Tobacco,” a task he performs alongside his father’s workers. But he is paid nothing because he is “the dirt farmer’s kid.” Through sensory details, Nance builds a vibrant world we can even smell:
On sandlugging days early in the season, we bend down double for the biggest & lowest leaves where the rattlesnakes nest & a hot gust of our own stink drifts up from our collars & armpits.
Meanwhile, the father looms as a tragic figure, losing the failing farm to become a sharecropper on his own land and smoking himself to death. “Homecoming” provides a sad assessment of what the son escaped when he left. Talking Burley, Sherry Chandler’s 2019 poetry collection, about growing up on a Kentucky tobacco farm, would make a good companion read.
And then there’s the rest of life. In the affecting Dragonfly section, relationships take wing one after another, their delights, yearning, and heartache recounted with a restraint that burnishes the emotions until
There must be a way
to stop the wanting:
to pack my heart in ice
like pricey steaks
sent through the mail
The smoke and dragonfly metaphors of flight and disappearance throughout make the full-stop self-revelations all the more startling, as in the haiku “Feral:”
Just don’t let them know
how feral you really are,
how little you care.
Nance has published two collections of photographs and haiku. It is a joy to find so many haiku in this collection. In the Meanwhile section, for example, we find a haiku sequence, “Seven Views of Owsley Fork.” And then there’s the delicious “Sunday Clothes:”
Lovely Lexington
in Sunday clothes, Saturday’s
bourbon on her breath.
Don DeLillo said, “All plots tend deathward,” and so does this carefully-arranged book. The poems in Afterward, the final section, begin with references to the Biblical Fall. In that story, of course, all of human experience comes “afterward.” The concept of death is tried on for size over and over. Death by Covid? See “A Sonnet, Just in Case.” When you find yourself at “Death’s Door?”
Put your good eye to the keyhole,
See nothing but darkness,
Knock.
Aging prompts thoughts of those who have gone before, as in “A Visitation,” six numbered haiku of precious memories about a grandma who returns through her scents: hand cream, hot biscuits, Beechnut snuff, Doublemint gum. Ending with a return to nature in “When This is All Over,” Smoke is a capstone performance, a beautiful and honest description of a life’s ups and downs.
As he explains in a note, Nance took a fifteen-year break from poetry before returning to it in 2019. Thank goodness he did.
ROSEMARIE WURTH-GRICE, DARKNESS CALLED US HOME.
GEORGETOWN KY: FINISHING LINE PRESS. ©2025. 18PP. $17.99.
After I finished reading Rosemarie Wurth-Grice’s first poetry chapbook, about living with grief, several lines kept coming back to me:
“How easy it is to be lost.”
“Hold your breath awhile, for it’s breathing that gives us away.” “In grief, they say, voices are the first to go.”
“How is it possible? /With your last breath, /we kept breathing.” “You have a place but your place is not here.”
This is hard grief work, handled with steadiness and grace, but no sentimentality.
The poetic voice is most often alone, calm, and observant. “A Morning Note to John,” its visual details sharp as a Vermeer painting, begins,
As I sit here at my kitchen table
sipping black coffee from a blue willow cup
……..
The dog at my feet nibbles on crumbs
fallen from a blueberry muffin
Quite a few creatures show up—squirrels, ravens, gulls, crows, bats, chameleons, cicadas—and especially rabbits. Plants, too—moss, moonflowers, cedar, aspen. Nature brings solace and a resigned understanding. Frank Lloyd Wright’s directive comes to mind: “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” After all, Wurth-Grice owns a blackberry and flower farm. But nothing works all the time. In “On Madness and Morning Meditations,” there are “days the madness creeps in.” And though her writing is crucial in processing grief, sometimes, as in “Ninety-five Moons of Jupiter,”
I am lost for words
a bat flying at night
mouth wide open
singing echo, echo, echo
Because grief goes in and out of focus. The cover art, a drawing of a rabbit’s head with two other shadowy rabbit heads sketched behind it, portrays that kind of fuzziness, while at the same time the drawing pays homage to three loved ones who are gone. Intention isn’t always in focus, either. “Sunday Morning Self-Revelation” consists of writing fragments that came to nothing. Now, gathered into one poem, they demonstrate an attempt to find meaning and order.
Literary references bring the poems into conversation with the Western canon—the Iliad, Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan,” Emily Dickinson, Alice in Wonderland, Pushkin. Particularly intriguing is “One for Sorrow,” written in response to the nursery rhyme of that name, about counting crows or magpies; and Andrea Kowch’s painting, “Soiree,” of a young woman having a weird, fancy tea party in the midst of a flock of crows (see online).
These poems should be read more than once. Only after my third reading did I link up the title, “Darkness called us home.,” with the drawing that closes the chapbook, of a rabbit hopping towards a dark hole in a hedge, and the poem “Rabbit Holes,” and how that all works, as the mind shifts between presence and absence.
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