Although this photo doesn’t have much to do with my grandmother’s poetry, I absolutely love it. Something tells me she wasn’t particularly fond of shooting a gun. Perhaps she was humoring Granddad, also pictured.
I grew up in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia. My mother’s mother, Lucile Shanklin Hull, was a local poet and published several books of poetry about the region. In her book, Lyrics of the Hills*, 1980, she celebrated the region and her community in Smyth County, Virginia. Many of her poems feel designed to promote a warm and romantic version of the community, such as “The Gay Bazaar”:
Hurry, hurry, hurry
To the gay bazaar!
For just around the corner,
Where throngs of people are
All a-hustle and a-bustle,
There will be displayed
Such a carnival of color-
Mingled art and artless wonder
Eager hands have made. (48)
But in other poems, as is true of the region, there are quiet pools of darkness; she makes commentary about strip mining, rural poverty, and war casualties. From page to page, there’s a rise and fall, mountain peaks warmed by sunlight—“From this tall pinnacle look far” (35)—to shady brooks haunted by loss: “She had come down the rocky path/ Winding along by Shooting Creek,/ And her clear young voice was mingled/ With the long, wild song of the water” (41). In yet others, my grandmother expresses her grief and struggle with depression: “The things I fear have tentacles/ To reach the very core of me;/ They twine themselves vine-wise about/ My hidden self insistently (“The Things I Fear” 46).
While I was growing up, my family rarely discussed the darkness in her poetry; the mountaintops were emphasized, not the gloomy valleys. I knew her as a young boy; she died when I was nine, and during years leading up to her death, her failing health had made it difficult for us to communicate.
When I was a sophomore in college, my mother showed me a folder of her unpublished poems. As she handed it to me, a newspaper clipping fluttered out. It was my uncle’s obituary. Younger than my mother and her sister, he had died as an infant in 1938. It was the first I’d heard of him.
When I asked my mother about it, she couldn’t talk about him—the pain, even after so many years, was still fresh—so I began rummaging through the poems, looking for those dark valleys in her work. I came across a poem called “Unseen,” in which she writes frankly of her loss: “No patient toy dog keeps watch;/ No rusty soldier, staunch and true,/ Upon a seldom dusted shelf/ Waits endlessly for you.” In Lyrics, there’s another poem which now I understand to be about my uncle: “When bugles blow/ And from afar/ The sound of war/ Shall echo near,/ He will not hear” (6). She imagines him never having to go to war, never waking from his peaceful sleep.
I was startled by these poems; it challenged the notion I had of my grandmother as a person and as a poet. I’d always read her poems as outward looking, whether she was describing life in rural Appalachia or making earnest objections to strip mining. I’d not noticed the gloomy, tree-muffled streams in her poetry, the dark waters in which she reflected herself. In her poem, “Introversion,” she writes:
I often come to you
So filled with thoughts of me
That your own finer self
I cannot see.
Perhaps you come to me
So full of you
That my own truer self
Is hidden too!
This poem is about failed communication, the inability for two introverted persons to reveal themselves to one another, how all that inward-looking can thwart connection, how our hidden-selves can distract us seeing others, from seeing the world. Although short, this poem hits me hard because it has such clarity and because I see myself in it; I’m often captivated by my own internal world, sometimes blocking out the world around me. I am so much like her.
That her poetry, however quiet and moss-covered, tells me that my penchant for darkness, for depression kept at bay, is part of a legacy. If we’d known one another as adults, we would’ve understood each other well.
*Hull, Lucile Shanklin. Lyrics of the Hills. Radford: Commonwealth Press. 1980. Print.
AS WE REACH the end of the year, I’m still a little startled. I did this thing: I wrote a book, and it was published. I’m thankful to everyone who supported me—from my husband Jeff to my agent Annie to the wonderful crew at Pegasus to bookstores and event planners and, of course, to the readers, friends and strangers alike. Love to you all!
