Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems
Introduction by Maggie Anderson Musically complex and intellectually sophisticated, Louise McNeill’s imagery and rhythms have their deepest sources in the West Virginia mountains where she was born in 1911 on a farm that has been in her family for nine generations. These are rooted poems, passionately concerned with stewardship of the land and with the various destructions of land and people that often come masked as “progress.” In colloquial, rural, and sometimes macabre imagery, Louise McNeill documents the effects of the change from a farm to an industrial economy on the West Virginia mountain people. She writes of the earliest white settlements on the western side of the Alleghenies and of the people who remained there through the coming of the roads, the timber and coal industries, and the several wars of this century. The reappearance of Louise McNeill’s long out-of-print poems will be cause for celebration for readers familiar with her work. Those reading it for the first time will discover musical, serious, idiosyncratic, and startling poems that define the Appalachian experience.
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Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems
Introduction by Maggie Anderson Musically complex and intellectually sophisticated, Louise McNeill’s imagery and rhythms have their deepest sources in the West Virginia mountains where she was born in 1911 on a farm that has been in her family for nine generations. These are rooted poems, passionately concerned with stewardship of the land and with the various destructions of land and people that often come masked as “progress.” In colloquial, rural, and sometimes macabre imagery, Louise McNeill documents the effects of the change from a farm to an industrial economy on the West Virginia mountain people. She writes of the earliest white settlements on the western side of the Alleghenies and of the people who remained there through the coming of the roads, the timber and coal industries, and the several wars of this century. The reappearance of Louise McNeill’s long out-of-print poems will be cause for celebration for readers familiar with her work. Those reading it for the first time will discover musical, serious, idiosyncratic, and startling poems that define the Appalachian experience.
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Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems

Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems

Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems

Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems

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Overview

Introduction by Maggie Anderson Musically complex and intellectually sophisticated, Louise McNeill’s imagery and rhythms have their deepest sources in the West Virginia mountains where she was born in 1911 on a farm that has been in her family for nine generations. These are rooted poems, passionately concerned with stewardship of the land and with the various destructions of land and people that often come masked as “progress.” In colloquial, rural, and sometimes macabre imagery, Louise McNeill documents the effects of the change from a farm to an industrial economy on the West Virginia mountain people. She writes of the earliest white settlements on the western side of the Alleghenies and of the people who remained there through the coming of the roads, the timber and coal industries, and the several wars of this century. The reappearance of Louise McNeill’s long out-of-print poems will be cause for celebration for readers familiar with her work. Those reading it for the first time will discover musical, serious, idiosyncratic, and startling poems that define the Appalachian experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822980698
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date: 10/15/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 168
File size: 698 KB

About the Author

Louise McNeill (Author)
Louise McNeill (1911–1993) was an accomplished American poet, short story writer, and essayist. She served as poet laureate of West Virginia from 1979 until her death in 1993. In 1988 she was awarded the Appalachian Gold Medallion by the University of Charleston. Her writings and papers are preserved at the West Virginia Region and History Center.

Maggie Anderson (Editor)
Maggie Anderson is the author of several poetry collections including, Years That Answer, Windfall, and A Space Filled with Moving. She is the editor of Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems of Louise McNeill, and co-editor of A Gathering of Poets, and Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School. Anderson has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches creative writing at Kent State University where she directs the Wick Poetry Program and edits the Wick Poetry Series through the Kent State University Press.

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
Editor's Note
Hill Daughter
Memoria
Warning
Blizzard
Snow Angels
American Boating Song (1939)
Mayapple Hill
Poet
The Dream
Lullaby
Aubade to Fear (Heavy with Child)
Second Sight (My Son's First Springtime)
Hill Daughter
Wire Brier
Fox and Geese
Hill Song
Faldang
Fiddler (1976)
Mountain Corn Song
Moonshiner
Wire Brier
Involved (The Spider)
Overheard on a Bus (Woman with a Cleft Palate)
Chestnut Orchard
First Flight
Lost in Orbit
How to Unbewitch a Backtracking Hound
Ballad of Joe Bittner
Stories at Evening (A Suburban Mother Tells Stories to Her Son)
Ballad of Miss Sally
Ballad of the Rest Home
West Virginia
Garden Moment
Coal Fern
Ballad of New River
Gauley Mountain
Arrow Grasses River Greenbrier
Gabriel MacElmain, Pioneer
The Clearing
The Flame
Cornelius Verner
Katchie Verner's Harvest
Oil Field
Lydia Verner
The Son
Pioneer Lullaby
Granny Saunders
Granny's Story
Martha MacElmain
Jane Renick MacElmain (1)
Jane Renick MacElmain (2)
Donna MacElmain
Susan O'Kane
Nora O'Kane
Tillie Sage (1)
Tillie Sage (2)
Tillie Sage (3)
Jed Kane
Sol Brady
The Turnpike
Traveler and Old Sorrel
Burying Field
The River
The Horsemen
Corner Tree
The Autumn Drives (Early 1800s)
The Horsemen
Timber Boom
Log Drive
Saturday Night (1890–1910)
First Train (1895)
The Spark
Deserted Lumber Yard
Reforestation
Saturday Night (1930s)
Stoic (Circa 1907)
The Company (Coal Miner)
Best House They Was Ever In (Retired Coal Operator)
Monongah (December 6, 1907, Marion County, West Virginia, on the Monongahela River)
Overheard on a Bus (Miner's Wife)
Winter Day (Coal Country)
The Hard Road
The Roads
The Great Depression
Depression Wind (Winter 1930)
Pasture Line Fence
Threnody for Old Orchards
The Grave Creek Inscribed Stone
The Runaway Team (Written a Few Days After John Glenn's Space Flight)
Time Is Our House
Time Is Our House
Cassandra
The New Corbies
After the Blast
Potherbs (Of the Edible Wild Plants My Granny Taught Me)
Of Fitness to Survive
Life-force
The Cave
“Light”
When the Scientists Told Me of the Expanding Universe
To the Boys in Freshman History (Thermopylae, 480 B.C.)
The Hounds
Epitaph in the Imperative Mode
The Passage of Time
The Verb
Wife
Backward Flight
Over the Mountain
Author's Notes
Bibliography
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