WEAVER’S KNOT

Bailey-Mershon presents a collection of poems about life in the Appalachian South.

The author waxes poetic about family and mountain living in this book. The speaker in “A Flatlander’s Mind Rests on Peaks,” for instance, refers to herself as a “writer born of blue lines, sheltered / since birth by sapphire mounds” who exiles herself to write, “Indigo ink spilling across a page.” She also recalls ancestors from a “land of butterflies and mists.” Another poem memorializes Viney Parker, a mountain-dweller with 16 children who founded a congregation. “The Hills’ Embrace” has the speaker tell of hiking in the mountains at different points in her life, feeling “Ghosts / swirl in the ebb of air–– wispy arms, / kisses soft as breath.” In “An Incantation for my Grandmothers,” the titular women must let go of their daughters, “feathers / tossed by angry winds, falling / lightly half a continent away”; in the title poem, though, the author acknowledges that “escape is not as simple / as saying good-bye.” “Back When I Was Juicy” recounts an early love affair with reading, while “Fertile Fields” deliciously describes the relief from a much-needed rainstorm. The few poems that turn attention away from the mountain landscape feel less profound. However, Bailey-Mershon’s details throughout the collection are tactile and often awe-inspiring, as when describing a grandmother’s “stiff hands / spinning, yarn spilling from pointed fingers” and a single mother with a “granite rich and husky” voice. Overcome with emotion while exploring Blue Spring Creek, another speaker feels “Words jam like logs in my throat.” The earth comes alive in a description of a mountain trail lined with “maples with the bark peeled back” and “mud-glazed pebbles” beside an “ancient spring,” and in another work, winter “arrives whistling like / a surprise we have coming.” The expansiveness of Appalachia and the wonder of family are also made clear: “Surely it’s / enough, on a cold winter eve, watching your own baby / sleep in a moon-blanketed room.”

A nostalgic set of works that’s steeped in family history.