Overview

This volume of Northern Appalachian poetry employs many traditional and modern poetic forms to survey the human and natural landscapes of that unique and often overlooked region. Featured forms include the sonnet, ballad, haiku, ode, villanelle, elegy, found poem, epigram, narrative poem, and blank and free verse. Topics are as varied as the delicacy of the region's wildflowers, the devastation wrought by mountaintop removal mining, Northern Appalachian folklore, and the state of the region's working class.

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"One of the most familiar and striking features of Northern Appalachia is the changing of the seasons. The contrasts and contradictions of these fluctuations are at once disconcerting and comforting. As are these poems. In the first two pieces of this insightful collection, Michael Comiskey gives us a stark comparison of beauty and exploitation in this undervalued and often neglected region. And the volume goes on, across a full year of seasons, through sharp observation, beautiful language, and skillfully crafted work, to share the poet's perception of his beloved home ground. It is a splendid and intelligent tribute to, as he writes in his Epilogue, ""a hard place that its people love."" Kirk Judd, author of My People Was Music and co-editor of Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry, 1950-1999 What Robert Frost did for New England in North of Boston, Michael Comiskey does for the region that lies south of Pittsburgh. The well-crafted poems in this book reveal Comiskey to be an astute observer of the land and people of Northern Appalachia. In a wide and impressive variety of forms, the poems in this collection celebrate the natural world, give voice to people exploited and then forgotten by industrialists and politicians, find humor in everyday encounters and folk tales, and pay homage to iconic places such as Fallingwater, the Shanksville memorial to heroes of 9/11, and the Great Allegheny Passage bicycle trail. If you have ever wondered what would happen if a political scientist and economist were to write first-rate poetry, here is your answer. Beverly Peterson, Ph.D., Associate Professor Emerita of English and American Studies, Penn State University"

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