Book Review

My Father's Speech
by Katherine Cottle
Apprentice House, 2007
http://www.apprenticehousepublishing.com.
ISBN-10: 1934074306

It is as if Katherine Cottle wrote My Father’s Speech, the winner of the first annual chapbook competition by Baltimore's Apprentice House Publishing, with a box of heirlooms beside her desk. It's as though the starting point for each poem was a different item pulled from the box. Turning it in admiration of her family history, Cottle set down a tender description. Together, the pieces become an elegy for a neglected lore, one of southern coal miners and their sometimes disturbing culture.

The title piece starts as a reflection on the sound of her father’s voice—it's "black as coal dust" and yet somehow has a flavor that suggests "greasy gravy/over biscuits and eggs"—and concludes the way that the rest of the poems in the first section begin: by imposing a story onto a photograph. In the chapbook's most startling and elegant stanza, Cottle describes an old picture of her youthful father, finding in it what he knows:

That he is a boy
that the ground becomes cool each evening,
that his father comes home after dinner
from the day shift,
that the mountain with the tallest pines
is the last point the sun will hit
before his mother will call him
into the house for the night.

Nice, that. Mostly, these poems are plain things, efficiently stripped so Cottle can head straight for the essence of her subjects. The fourteen poems in the chapbook, mostly first-person narratives, range from slice-of-life ditties like "Spit Can," a guileless ode about the can her grandfather used for tobacco juice, to "Digging to China," which starts as another earthy reflection on childhood and expands to something a bit loftier: it ends with a bird taking flight and the author fitting into the earth, finally.

So Cottle does a bit of her own mining. She has that Poetic inclination to dig for a transcendence hidden in the ordinary keepsakes that she uses to start her poems. And that's the thing about heirlooms—if you don't know it was built by your father's father as an anniversary present, it's just a rickety chair. Cottle's challenge, then, is to communicate what's meaningful and worthwhile in her private treasure chest. Taken as a whole, the book succeeds nicely. There is a cohesive mood; Cottle manages reverence and skepticism equally well, and so injects something sublime into the world she gives the reader. This makes My Father's Speech something that is best read through in one sitting, and the chapbooks brevity allows for that.

Individually, the poems bewilder more. When Cottle allows her story to speak for itself—that is, when she finds the proper way to describe something so that a story emerges – as she does in "Appalachian Portraits," she invokes the experiences of her characters to create a rich world and edify the readers’ sense of their own. She describes Lee Hall, a retired miner with one eye, using little pomp: "He is dressed formally"..."his mouth, caved in/from the lack of teeth,/puckers behind prickly stubble." Describing someone in these terms is meaningful in (though not because of) the simplicity. That’s how photography works; a good picture conveys a story and its interpretation in the same frame. It must be Cottle’s supposition that, since she is basically translating a photograph into language, she ought to go further and lay out its meaning. Accordingly, she concludes her examination of Lee Hall saying that the skin around his missing eye "is his only guard/against a shadowed hole/against an empty socket/that only mimics sight." Applying her perspective so directly obscures the more interesting and immediate characters she's developed by such bare description. The way she reaches for these morsels at the end of almost every poem becomes tedious.

"Arrowhead" is a short, lovely piece that accomplishes a lot at first by limiting its scope. Cottle describes her father laid up by bug bites after digging for arrowheads, then leaps forward to show him examining the rock as an old man (and is gone about beautifully: "his body/a vessel of scampering life"):

He rubbed his scabbed fingers
over the sharp, carved edges,
imagining the battle,
the sharp piercing of the prey

I wish Cottle trusted that describing the way her aged father rubs an arrowhead would invite the reader to wonder about what he was imagining, but she tends to fill in those blanks for us. In this case, she does it lucidly and it isn't unlikable. Other times, as in "Two Bats," her pondering confuses things. The narrator sees two bats in the driveway, imagines the circumstances that brought them there, then asks an unknown third party, "Unlike them, did you doubt the moment before?/Or did you believe the ground would save you/when the sky could not?" What does this mean? To whom does she refer?

Ultimately, though, Cottle's deep probing is analogous to the subject matter; it makes sense that a book about mining communities ought to dig below the surface. While the men she writes about spent their lives tunneling into the earth for a living, she tunnels into their lives for meaning. Southern coal miners, people who handle snakes to test their holiness, who tattoo their young cousins, who shoot their brothers, don’t need a lot of meaning imposed on them. They carry poetic intensity by the fact of their existence. Cottle’s talent is that she knows what to tell us about them.—Adam Robinson