Appalachian Heritage

Gentry, Jane. A Garden in Kentucky. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. 74 pages. Hardcover $17.95. Paperback $9.95. A reader who knows when dog days come, who loves summer music of cicadas, who knows what a brown study is, will delight in Jane Gentry's A Garden in Kentucky. The mountain culture of Kentucky inspires her poems , and Gentry's ear for the music of language will make any reader stop to recite verses and whole poems. Gentry's works are rooted in the soil, and yet her worldview harks back to the ideas of classical culture. Gentry's poems are poignant because, even as she details the satisfactions and sustenance of an agrarian life, she records how it is being encroached upon by our modern way of living for convenience and acquisition . The title poem is set in a Kroger's, a supermarket chain, where "under a fluorescent sun ... it is always southern California" and "hard avocados rot as they ripen from the center out." The image of putrefaction suggests the falseness of modern life, which violates geography and season. An orchard and farmhouse stand next to the store's parking lot. Here a man and woman live close to the earth: "When thaw comes, the man turns up/ the sod and, on its underside, ciphers / roots and worms." These people have commerce with nature, and they know what natural signs mean. Gentry echoes the false sun in the Kroger with an image of the literal sun transformed by metaphor: The sun like an angel beats its wings above their grubbing. Evenings on the viny porch they rock, discussing clouds, the chance of rain. Husks in the dark dirt fatten and burst. The figure of the angel suggests benediction, which stands in contrast to the sterile "fluorescent sun." The rhetorical movement from the angel, to the man and woman rocking in evening, to the final image offertility ofthe seed is significant. Gentry moves from the spiritual to the physical and locates both of these realms, finally, in the soil. The soil is a central, recurring image, symbolizing the past and the sacred in such fine poems as "Your Vacation" and "Janus." Classical literature and ideas influence Gentry's central themes, including , for instance, her idea ofan afterlife. In "Thinking of Charlie B. on July 4," she creates this image: 67 his grave open to all earth's weathers, his atoms dancing out into the summer night to the rhythm of cicadas singing, "Body, Body, Body," .... The dancing atoms convey the idea of materialism, as expressed by the Roman Lucretius in De rerum natura. Like the Greek materialists before him, he denied the existence of soul, believing that when the body dies, its constituent atoms return to the ever changing flux of physical, universal processes. Gentry, however, does not embrace oblivion. The speaker hears at last in the cicadas' music, "That old drum of darkness, / 'Body, Body, Body,' which marches us all into that new city." The new city represents some place of habitation after death. Though she does not explain it precisely, Gentry makes clear that it is not an orthodox conception of bliss in "Maugie's Heaven." Here Gentry subtly creates the idea of universal flux by beginning each of the poem's two stanzas with robins singing in June, the first image in memory, the second in the present. The speaker imagines Maugie, her deceased grandmother, this way: Lying deep in spring lapped in hymns of dirt beneath the teeth of grass, she dreams that robins sing their lust above her empty house, the bed she made, among hallelujahs of new leaves. While the poet makes use ofChristian imagery, she conceives an afterlife that is Lucretian. Maugie's heaven is not with angels and saints. She has been subsumed into the elements and has her rebirth, not in the resurrection , but in the spring. An American poet could only learn this subde, ironic undercutting of orthodox symbolism from Emily Dickinson, but Gentry is far from Dickinson's impish detachment. The exuberance of "hallelujahs of new leaves" comes from her own fresh voice. Such affirming joy is a risk for contemporary poets, steeped in the...