Appalachian Heritage

lyrical and technical are somewhat less so. A good story can cover a multitude of sins, and there are here, though not a multitude, at least a few sins that need covering. The prosody is relatively undistinguished free verse, and occasionally the syntax offers more challenge than reward. More problematic, though, is a failure of tone which occasionally breaks the reader's comfortable identification with the speaker. One such lapse is evident, for example, in "The Grown-Up Miracle." In that poem, Victor has embarrassed Helen with a drunken telephone conversation which she and her friends overhear. Unfortunately, his repeated "I won't apologize for my anger"—though probably a healthy morningafter sentiment—sounds a little too much like talk-show psychobabble. Of course in working with such highly charged subject matter, Depta continually walks the narrow ledge that divides broadly appealing pathos and the pathetic. When his craft is up to the challenge, as it usually is, the result is compelling and satisfying reading. But when craft does break down, the result is self-pity without an undercutting irony to make it bearable. This is, it seems, a risk inherent in the confessional mode, and when Depta fails he is in good company. But the fact that even Snodgrass and Lowell have occasionally made the same misstep does not make it any easier to read. Fortunately, Depta seldom loses control, and the momentum of the narrative usually carries the reader over the weakness of certain individual poems. In the end, The Helen Poems is not a workshop study in poetic technique—as evident as Depta's craftsmanship may be. The book's force is rooted in the poet's ability, through a deftly controlled narrative, to bring the pain and bliss of parenting before us and to make us feel his experience as our own. It is hard to imagine any parent not finding a mirror of troubled waters in the book, and to the degree that the trader's experience may parallel Depta's, The Helen Poems is compelling reading indeed. —William Jolliff Jeff Daniel Marion, Lost and Found. Abingdon, Virginia: The Sow's Ear Press, 1994. Paperback, 54 Pages. $9.95. Jeff" Daniel Marion, a poet of East Tennessee, preserves the place and its people through the power of his words. His books of poetry, Out in the Country Back Home, Tight Lines, and Vigils, reflect his strong sense of place and family, as does his children's picture book, Hello, Crow. As director of Appalachian Studies and poet-in-residence at CarsonNewman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, he continues to preserve 63 and to share his region and his people and to probe into universal questions that bind Appalachians to all people. In his latest book of poems, Lost and Found, Jeff Daniel Marion struggles with the past and its continuance into the future. Through a collage of colors, nature images, and biblical allusions, the poet blends the past, the present, and the future, but understanding of the connection is as elusive as nature's mysteries. Marion seeks meaning to it all, but he is haunted by the evasiveness of an answer. In his poetry, tones and hues of the past are alluring and flickering hints of meaning are seductive —but never clear. In Part I, "In My Father's House," the biblical allusion suggests Marion's struggle not just with the past and future of his earthly father's "house" (the family), but also with the bigger picture: his father's role in the "great scheme of things." In the first poem of this group, "Christmas Fireworks, 1948," the poet remembers his father's homemade fireworks, "blazing ornaments of memory." The memory is of softballs, "rag-wrapped, tightly bound wads,/ in kerosene"; of "our fathers/in mackinaws and leather work gloves"; and of their search for meaning as they "laugh at the darkness/shot through with arcing fiery fastballs." There is no understanding of the "darkness," just the remembrance of his father's defiance of that which he does not understand, and the poet and the reader still continue to "see through a glass darkly." In "The Man Who Loved Hummingbirds," the poet remembers his...