A taste of Appalachian poetry
This past weekend was given over to reorganizing the books in my home library. In the process, I relocated a volume of poems I had feared was long lost.
My favorite “Appalachian” poets would be Robert Morgan, Kay Stripling Byer, and James Still. Morgan and Byer are still going strong. Still passed away in 2001.
I never met James Still, but we corresponded in the 1970s with some frequency. Wilma Dykeman and her husband, James Stokely, close friends of Still’s, had suggested I might enjoy his work. They especially recommended Hounds on the Mountain, a collection of poems that had appeared in 1937 when he was generally recognized as “one of the strongest voices to emerge in Appalachian literature.”
Born in 1906 in LaFayette, Alabama, Still was librarian at the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky during the 1930s. Following a stint in the Air Force during World War II, he became a freelance writer. In 1952, he returned to the Hindman Settlement School, again as the librarian. He stayed on for 10 years or more, but left that post to teach and write.
After I did indeed become enthusiastic about Still, who was somewhat reclusive, Wilma Dykeman said he would like to hear from me. At that time, for various reasons, Still had not, to my knowledge, published a book of any sort for almost 25 years and was pleased to be remembered. He did, of course, resurrect his career in the mid-1970s and go on to publish various poetry collections, novels, and children’s books, so that he is now sometimes referred to as the “Dean of Appalachian Literature.”
I have apparently lost our correspondence, but, sure enough, the volume that reappeared this weekend was Hounds on the Mountain, published by The Viking Press in a “first edition limited to seven hundred fifty numbered copies of which seven hundred are for sale.” My copy is hand-numbered in ink as being “435.” I had mailed it to Still, asking if he’d sign it. It came back inscribed on the front flyleaf: “For / George Ellison / Who has kept my poems / in his heart all ‘these sleeping years,’— / with greetings, and gratitude. / James Still / November 25, 1975.”
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From the Mountains, From the Valley (Univ. of Kentucky Press, 2001) collects all of Still’s poems, including those that appeared in Hounds of the Mountain. I reread them this weekend with delight and remembrance of a fine poet. I recommend them to you. Here are some sample stanzas:
From Rain on the Cumberlands
Rain in the beechwood trees. Rain upon the wanderer
Whose breath lies cold upon the mountainside,
Caught up with broken horns within the nettled grass,
With hooves relinquished on the breathing stones
Eaten with rain-strokes.
From Hounds on the Mountain
Hounds on the mountain ....
Grey and swift spinning the quarry shall turn
At the cove’s ending, at the slow day’s breaking,
And lave the violent shadows with her blood.
From Graveyard
There is no town so quiet on any earth,
Nor any house so dark upon the mind.
Only the night is here, and the dead
Under the hard blind eyes of hill and tree.
Here lives sleep. Here the dead are free.
From Horseback in the Rain
To the stone, to the mud
With hoofs busy clattering
In a fog-wrinkled spreading
Of waters? Halt not. Stay not.
Ride the storm with no ending
On a road unarriving.
From Spring on Troublesome Creek
Not all of us were warm, not all of us.
We are winter-lean, our faces are sharp with cold
And there is the smell of wood smoke in our clothes;
Not all of us were warm, though we have hugged the fire
Through the long chilled nights.
From Mountain Dulcimer
The dulcimer sings from fretted throat
Of the doe’s swift poise, the fox’s fleeting step
And the music of hounds upon the outward slope
Stirring the night, drumming the ridge-strewn way.
From Child in the Hills
Where on these hills are tracks a small foot made,
Where rests the echo of his voice calling to the crows
In sprouting corn? Here are tall trees his eyes
Have measured to their tops, here lies fallow earth
Unfurrowed by terracing plows these sleeping years.
George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
