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Kentucky Voices
Driving with the Dead: Poems
Appalachia is no stranger to loss. The region suffers regular ecological devastation wrought by strip mining, fracking, and deforestation as well as personal tragedy brought on by enduring poverty and drug addiction. In Driving with the Dead , Appalachian poet, teacher, and artist Jane Hicks weaves an earnest and impassioned elegy for an imperiled yet doggedly optimistic people and place. Exploring the roles that war, environment, culture, and violence play in Appalachian society, the hard-hitting collection is visceral and unflinchingly honest, mourning a land and people devastated by economic hardship, farm foreclosures, and mountaintop removal.
With empathy and a voice of experience, Hicks offers readers a poignant collection of poems that addresses themes of grief and death while also illustrating the beauty, grace, and resilience of the Appalachian people. Invoking personal memories, she explores how the loss of physical landscape has also devastated the region's psychological landscape.
Graphic, bold, and heartfelt, Driving with the Dead is an honest and compelling call to arms. Hicks laments the irreplaceable treasures that we have lost but also offers wisdom for healing and reconciliation.
With empathy and a voice of experience, Hicks offers readers a poignant collection of poems that addresses themes of grief and death while also illustrating the beauty, grace, and resilience of the Appalachian people. Invoking personal memories, she explores how the loss of physical landscape has also devastated the region's psychological landscape.
Graphic, bold, and heartfelt, Driving with the Dead is an honest and compelling call to arms. Hicks laments the irreplaceable treasures that we have lost but also offers wisdom for healing and reconciliation.
- GenresPoetry
82 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 27, 2014
Driving with the Dead by Jane Hicks
University Press of Kentucky, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8131-4555-6
Perfect bound, 59 pp., $19.95
Review by Catherine Moore
In her second collection, Driving with the Dead, Hicks places the reader firmly into the Appalachian mountains. As the title of the book suggests, this is collection about loss. Readers will see both the expected grief of the region, the farm foreclosures and mountains devastated by greed, along with less-seen sides of small town life, from Vietnam drafts to present day meth labs. In ample detail and with authentic voice, Hicks names the places and people of her childhood. She does not shy away the losses found both by personal claim and cultural history.
For readers who appreciate scenes of rural Appalachia, they will not be disappointed. “It’s a stain on fine linen after funeral food/ dark-papered dining rooms, high ceilings,/ candles burned to sooty stubs.” This, part of Hick’s description of darkness in “The Color of Loss” (pg. 18) may be the most lyrical piece in the collection, as the work here is deeply rooted in the narrative. Hicks is the gatherer of family stories, with the joys and sorrows therein. The simplicity of a life in service (“The Grace of Risen Dough” pg. 39) and the complexities of industry (“Black Mountain Breakdown” pg. 17) and suburbia (“Dust” pg. 57) encroaching the hill communities. Through each, Hicks travels the less nostalgic path.
I admire the honesty in this collection. Such as the unsentimental poem “My Grandmother Escapes” (pg. 42) about the rescue of a relative who stricken with Alzheimers is wandering barefoot down a rural highway. And of the post-rescue silence, the poet writes “Her tangled and plaqued neurons/ chocked the speech from her. I was relieved, for nothing/ good ever came from it.” While there is the familial concern for the safety of this soul, there is no grief for the loss of her Grandmother’s acerbic tongue.
Hicks storytelling talent shines in intense and authentic narratives like that in the “Draft Lottery” (pg. 13) where a group of young adults huddle in the tiny office “behind the meat locker” of a local Taco King to watch a small B&W TV screen. They are watching their draft numbers tumbling around in a cage, while outside—
July gripped the pavement,
hunkered down and hovered, the Hardees across
the parking lot shimmered a mirage, the world
beyond a blur. No customers came, perhaps glued
to televisions numbering their sons.
Consider that as your last moment of freedom, in the swelter of a low-pay job. A lousy fast-food job that in this moment I imagine one would rather to cling to, instead of heading to Vietnam. These are the kind of moments that Hicks leads us to consider. I believe the collection makes the case that these are the moments that matter for poetry.
What a reader will not find in this collection are many poetic devices— enjambment, extended metaphor, or experimental forms. The poems are quite traditional in structure and musically soft in cadence. Some may find the language a little pedestrian. I view the poet as having made the choice that the pinch in these poems will come from subject matter rather than rhetoric. In what Lisa William’s blurb for the collection describes, “Jane Hick’s poems are a ‘fierce serenade’.”
I think Hicks answers any such criticism in her manifesto-like “A Poet’s Work” (pg. 52-53). After invoking a quote from Seamus Heaney, Hicks catalogs the losses found within the subjects of her poetry: toddlers crushed in the falling rock of mining country, meth labs that supplement income from piddly jobs, and families left behind when moms are called overseas by the National Guard. Hicks is defiant in her address of poetic aesthetics and I’ll leave her to have the final say— “Spare me the postmodern pout, the academic angst/ … mindful of a poet’s work, the naming of what matters.”
University Press of Kentucky, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8131-4555-6
Perfect bound, 59 pp., $19.95
Review by Catherine Moore
In her second collection, Driving with the Dead, Hicks places the reader firmly into the Appalachian mountains. As the title of the book suggests, this is collection about loss. Readers will see both the expected grief of the region, the farm foreclosures and mountains devastated by greed, along with less-seen sides of small town life, from Vietnam drafts to present day meth labs. In ample detail and with authentic voice, Hicks names the places and people of her childhood. She does not shy away the losses found both by personal claim and cultural history.
For readers who appreciate scenes of rural Appalachia, they will not be disappointed. “It’s a stain on fine linen after funeral food/ dark-papered dining rooms, high ceilings,/ candles burned to sooty stubs.” This, part of Hick’s description of darkness in “The Color of Loss” (pg. 18) may be the most lyrical piece in the collection, as the work here is deeply rooted in the narrative. Hicks is the gatherer of family stories, with the joys and sorrows therein. The simplicity of a life in service (“The Grace of Risen Dough” pg. 39) and the complexities of industry (“Black Mountain Breakdown” pg. 17) and suburbia (“Dust” pg. 57) encroaching the hill communities. Through each, Hicks travels the less nostalgic path.
I admire the honesty in this collection. Such as the unsentimental poem “My Grandmother Escapes” (pg. 42) about the rescue of a relative who stricken with Alzheimers is wandering barefoot down a rural highway. And of the post-rescue silence, the poet writes “Her tangled and plaqued neurons/ chocked the speech from her. I was relieved, for nothing/ good ever came from it.” While there is the familial concern for the safety of this soul, there is no grief for the loss of her Grandmother’s acerbic tongue.
Hicks storytelling talent shines in intense and authentic narratives like that in the “Draft Lottery” (pg. 13) where a group of young adults huddle in the tiny office “behind the meat locker” of a local Taco King to watch a small B&W TV screen. They are watching their draft numbers tumbling around in a cage, while outside—
July gripped the pavement,
hunkered down and hovered, the Hardees across
the parking lot shimmered a mirage, the world
beyond a blur. No customers came, perhaps glued
to televisions numbering their sons.
Consider that as your last moment of freedom, in the swelter of a low-pay job. A lousy fast-food job that in this moment I imagine one would rather to cling to, instead of heading to Vietnam. These are the kind of moments that Hicks leads us to consider. I believe the collection makes the case that these are the moments that matter for poetry.
What a reader will not find in this collection are many poetic devices— enjambment, extended metaphor, or experimental forms. The poems are quite traditional in structure and musically soft in cadence. Some may find the language a little pedestrian. I view the poet as having made the choice that the pinch in these poems will come from subject matter rather than rhetoric. In what Lisa William’s blurb for the collection describes, “Jane Hick’s poems are a ‘fierce serenade’.”
I think Hicks answers any such criticism in her manifesto-like “A Poet’s Work” (pg. 52-53). After invoking a quote from Seamus Heaney, Hicks catalogs the losses found within the subjects of her poetry: toddlers crushed in the falling rock of mining country, meth labs that supplement income from piddly jobs, and families left behind when moms are called overseas by the National Guard. Hicks is defiant in her address of poetic aesthetics and I’ll leave her to have the final say— “Spare me the postmodern pout, the academic angst/ … mindful of a poet’s work, the naming of what matters.”
November 2, 2015
Loved this book-another brave and honest female voice coming out of the hills. I don't believe the southern region has ever had a stronger, more talented, more prolific group of female poets. This book won the Appalachian Writers Assoc. Book of the Year in poetry.
August 18, 2014
I will read and reread this excellent collection.
July 25, 2024
beautiful beautiful beautiful. i got to listen to this poet read her work this week in person and every poem i read in this book, i could hear her voice reading it back to me, which added so much more to the work as a whole.
November 17, 2016
Hicks creates raw scenes of Appalachia within her poetry, ranging from the 1960s-2000s. She addresses every day life, family, and coal mining within her poetry collection.
For many poems, as a reader who did grow up in E. TN, Appalachia, I still felt a generation away from grasping all the meaning she puts into her poems. These poems are for the niche of my mother and grandmother easily; it takes generations afterwards perhaps a little more work to dig through the metaphors and the specific names of people famous during the '70s.
Yet her poetry easily reminded me of my great-grandmother who still lives in the mountains of eastern KY. While being out of the loop on many niche names, Hicks does a good job at keeping those who might not be well versed in 70s knowledge by engaging in very real and raw descriptions of life in Appalachia.
Overall, a good, solid read but perhaps better for those of another generation or for those willing to put in the extra work.
For many poems, as a reader who did grow up in E. TN, Appalachia, I still felt a generation away from grasping all the meaning she puts into her poems. These poems are for the niche of my mother and grandmother easily; it takes generations afterwards perhaps a little more work to dig through the metaphors and the specific names of people famous during the '70s.
Yet her poetry easily reminded me of my great-grandmother who still lives in the mountains of eastern KY. While being out of the loop on many niche names, Hicks does a good job at keeping those who might not be well versed in 70s knowledge by engaging in very real and raw descriptions of life in Appalachia.
Overall, a good, solid read but perhaps better for those of another generation or for those willing to put in the extra work.
December 19, 2019
A trip through different times and places in KY
Lovely poems that give a taste of Kentucky and Tennessee. I found myself reading the whole thing in one afternoon. The old pictures and postcards were a nice addition as well.
Lovely poems that give a taste of Kentucky and Tennessee. I found myself reading the whole thing in one afternoon. The old pictures and postcards were a nice addition as well.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews