BOOK REVIEW:
CREEKWATER MANSIONS
BY IAN HALL
A BOOK REVIEW BY HUGH BLANTON
Ian Hall’s debut collection of poetry, Creekwater Mansions, has a striking originality that betrays no pastiche to any of the Kentucky masters that came before him. He’s fulfilling a tradition rather than furthering it. The poems here are not organized so much as tumbled forth—we get the Civil War, his distaste for city life, a walk through an automobile junkyard—and the reader cannot predict, despite Hall’s preoccupations, what the next subject will be. He’s the polar opposite of poets of silence like Keats and Celan, his poems are filled with profusions such as a house disemboweled of its copper wire or Colonel James Garfield (the future President) defeating the Confederates in Eastern Kentucky in 1862. Hall plunges into image with meticulous abandon:
Jumper cables like macabre spaghetti,
pistons, schismed manifolds: a Gettysburg
of tinker & shrapnel to paw through. But this junkage,
this totaled zip code, does not trouble
the squirrels, who are like clockwork
laying next season’s supper away in the dark
escrow of tree holes, a clobbered sedan.
His eye turns toward each new observation with whimsy and excitement; he’s an unrhyming Frost with each poem as complete as a Wendell Berry novel.
Creekwater Mansions is a debut collection, but Hall has established himself as a poet of place, even while he takes us on infrequent sojourns out. Cultural depictions of Appalachia often only show the pitiably downtrodden and they miss the humor that Hall finds. His virtuosity is in the precision in which he states their cases, even when the case he’s making isn’t complimentary: “That place is rotten/ with southpaws & anemics.” He’s referring to Letcher County where a candidate he liked lost an election. He goes on: “I won’t beat a dead horse & bring up how tectonically// stupid they are.” But he still takes pride in where he’s from:
Our national flower: an auger bit.
Our anthem? The occasional
clangs from a rip-roaring game
of horseshoes. & even though it violates
the Establishment Clause, blacking out
off Goldschlager & praying you barf
up a truck payment is our bonded
religion.
Hall’s obviously not entranced by his own designs, he would not make a good classical lyricist. He ingeniously indulges his free verse and in fact the only thing approaching the formal in this collection is a single quasi-sonnet that we wouldn’t even know was a sonnet except that “Sonnet” is in the title. Hall doesn’t fall for the trap of trying to impose form on unruly subjects.
There’s much tribute and elegy to coal miners in Creekwater Mansions. In “The Coalblacked Jacobins” a group of miners are preparing to strike and one of the miners addresses the mine owner: “I don’t aim to keep pickaxing/ years off my life so some Philadelphian’s daughter can get college/ learnt & trot around in jodhpurs. I want my due.” Hall writes of the children in Harlan County schools who gave up saying the Pledge of Allegiance back during the bloody coal mine strikes of the 1930s and instead sang the Pete Seeger song “Who’s Side Are You On?” (written by Florence Reece, a union leader’s wife). The miners themselves sang songs of protest during drunken nights of the strikes, “their baritones/ gruff with silicosis.”
Hall gives us his version of Aesop’s “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse” in a scathing indictment of city life: “& best of all, you never had to deal with the sidewalks/ full of malnourished loons, each blubbering help me, my per-frontal/ cortex is on the fritz.” He also takes a shot at urban Gen Z’s propensity for depression and psychotherapy, saying country doctors “would only prescribe/ push-ups, aggressive doses/ of contact sport.” Hall describes city folk during his brief stay with them:
At soft dark the alarms cluck
hen-skittish & everyone has their own boutique
neuroses. Shit, most people here are in mad love
with their own prattle. They misknow
the lowliest smudge on a spectacle lens
for profundity—the sun going
tweed behind clouds at twilight.
The “in mad” inversion and the “misknow” serve to raise the temperature of his blow torch’s flame.
While fellow Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren’s poems are vast, stately mansions in which you slowly visit room after elegantly furnished room, Hall’s are bare-wood, corrugated tin roof shacks, with occasional clapboard cottages thrown in. Warren rarely allowed himself to be entertaining, he was far too intent on being poetic and ranted on about the Civil War as though it had never ended. Hall is a poet of wit and cranky passions, he rarely reaches for abstractions. His few attempts at lyricism come off more like pot banging music: “Bugs suicide in citronella./ This is gnarly terroir, but all are battened// blithe to mattresses.” Hall speaks relentlessly in his own voice, or, since he’s a newer poet, what the reader is encouraged to construe as the voice of poet in rural informality. Such a voice is gratifying when it doesn’t take itself seriously.
There’s a subtle subversive element in Hall’s violations of decorum—here he takes a shot at the snobs over in Western Kentucky: “we hayseeds/ from too far east of the bluegrass being a hazard/ to property lines & public safety.” With most of his poems taking place in Eastern Kentucky, you can still make of his poetry a travelogue and Hall the overworked guide getting on to the next Civil War battlefield park, on to the next salvage yard, and on to the next county fair. “West Kentucky—shit—out there it’s so flat// you can watch your dog run away for a week.” Hall moves gracefully between levity and tragedy, a lot of his poems are elegiac for grandfathers, fathers, his own childhood. Rural poets have a tendency to pass themselves off as sages and backwoods naturalists who have learned the nutritional content of every berry and root, but there’s a complete lack of pretension in Hall. And while it’s always been fashionable to be a poet in exile, Hall firmly claims his Kentucky home. As a newer poet he’s disconcertingly shrewd and avoids the grandiloquent windbaggery of many of the southern gentlemen poets who came before him. And The younger Hall already knows something that the older Robert Penn Warren never learned: when to shut up.
Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Creekwater Mansions is his debut collection of poetry.
CREEKWATER MANSIONS
BY IAN HALL
AVAILABLE THROUGH EASTOVER PRESS
Hugh Blanton’s latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.
