Wolfpen Poems

Plot

By choice, James Still has lived most of his 80 years in Eastern Kentucky, in the Hindman Settlement; though born in Alabama, he says that the day he arrived in Knott County, he "felt he had come home," and was cast on the "mighty river of earth" with "the living and the dead riding the waters." As with Roy Helton, another good poet drawn to Appalachia from the outlands, he has "drunk lonesome water," and so for the rest of life has been "bound to the hills." "The Wolfpen Poems" seem to me to establish Still as the truest and most remarkable poet that the mountain culture has produced. He is a more permanently valuable writer, for instance, than his fellow Kentuckian, Jesse Stuart, who shared some of Still's background but was shamelessly exploitative of it, very nearly to the point of becoming a professional hillbilly. There is none of this attitude in Still's example. The poems are quiet, imaginative and sincere, and the poet's terrible grief over the loss of a way of life ("when the dulcimers are gone") registers with double effect because of the modesty of statement. Throughout everything, Still writes that there is a continual sense of both custom and uniqueness, of tradition and at the same time the strangeness of the tradition, of work and wonder, of the everyday things one does in order to survive, taking place in a kind of timelessness, a world of sacramental objects.