Past, present mingle in collections by East Tenn. poets
EDITOR’S NOTE: Susan O’Dell Underwood and Denton Loving will appear at the 2024 Tennessee Mountain Writers Conference in Oak Ridge on April 4-6.
The Cumberland Gap farmland where Denton Loving lives suffuses the atmosphere of his poems in consistently powerful ways. Loving’s memorable debut collection, 2015’s “Crimes Against Birds,” established his ability to engage the orchards, cattle grazing fields, and barn lofts of his upbringing with fresh, original observations. Part of that unique perspective involves the pull of the dream world.
With his latest collection, “Tamp,” Loving has deepened his vision with the ever-present undertow of grief, speaking to the aftermath of his father’s death. “Tamp” opens with “Another River of the Underworld,” a tense, evocative dreamscape. The speaker tells us, “I walk the banks / of an ancient, unnamed river / surrounding the island of my dead.”
These lines set the tone for the rest of the collection, in which the underworld of dreams always hovers close. In Loving’s poems dreams provide a constant source of both mystery and understanding. “So much else / remains obscure, but this I know: / sleep is another kind of prayer.”
These tensions within the poems create a sense of haunting immediacy. Whether the speaker is feeling baffled that everyday life continues despite his acute grief or remembering by name some of the cows he held in special affection during childhood, each poem stretches taut between our perception of the material world around us and the ineffable, inescapable pull of a deeper world.
The modern-day Appalachians who populate East Tennessee native Susan O’Dell Underwood’s poems maintain a split consciousness, hovering between the present and the past. “Splinter’s” two opening poems, “Appalachian Diaspora” and “Holler,” establish Underwood’s perspective on the complex legacy of Appalachians leaving home for economic and educational opportunity − whether they leave for their own motivations or must flee collapsing industry, farmland losses, or ecological upheavals.
For those who stay and for those who go, Underwood’s work insists, the costs are high. “Splinter” offers a reckoning with this inheritance. These poems depict moments when the past breaks into a distracted