Every once in a great while, a reader encounters a collection of poetry that leaves a pleasantly gritty residue in the mind. Such is the case with William Woolfitt’s The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (Belle Point Press 2024). In sixty pages, hard labor, stark poverty, tragic history, and environmental dystopia blend with sounds of the blues, clear mountain mornings, and loving portrayals of family and friends. The combination of these elements, not unlike the refining of coal, results in a kind of mental heat that stays with the audience well after the book has been closed.
Woolfitt is well-acquainted with tools of poetry like imagery and meaningful line breaks, but these devices are deployed to serve the message of each poem rather than calling attention to themselves. Regionalism is everywhere in this collection, as West Virginia and its coal-industry vernacular dominate poems that document both the reward and the punishment of a life spent in mining – a practice that the author clearly wrestles with. He acknowledges its devastation of land, health, and culture, but simultaneously, an astute reader can tell that Woolfitt knows his art (even his life) would not exist without the ages-deep legacy of American coal mining.
And despite its firm reliance upon the past, this volume is also contemporary; the author gives credit in some works to present-day poets who have influenced his work. Names like Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Smith, and Kimiko Hahn appear throughout, even as poems document matters far from the native comfort zones of these writers. By blending the rustic and rural with the modern, Woolfitt achieves a kind of folk art in verse – a body of works comparable to a classic B.B. King album, smoothing together nature and nurture with truth.
No one will argue against this book’s authenticity. Poems detailing the harvesting, preparation, and consumption of squirrel, for example, contain details too real to be fictionalized. There are times when one has to look away from the page to ensure that no coal dust has settled in the vicinity. Novel yet firmly rooted, this concrete presentation of a black-lunged but beautiful world achieves poetic power. For a while, the reader can inhabit a place and time deeply conflicted and inherently lovely, a geographic oxymoron that the poet knows well.
Its resistance to nostalgia and its unvarnished exposure of working-class life will doubtless draw comparisons to work by Philip Levine, Dave Smith, and perhaps Ted Kooser. But Woolfitt’s work adds something else to the time-tested formula of using blue-collar existence in poetry: The writer also chronicles the persecution of Native Americans, documents fatherhood, and commemorates the songs that sustained prior generations during trials large and small.
This subject-matter diversity would render insufficient a comparison to Appalachia-inspired prose work like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. While both books feature strong representations of a similar region, Woolfitt’s poems pack emotional resonance into concise vignettes, providing a Whitman’s sampler of rich experiences rather than a drawn-out gourmet meal that leaves the diner feeling overindulged.
There is also a preponderance of the color black throughout Woolfitt’s book: The collection is marked by “tracks” not unlike a vinyl record, and of course, with its prevalent coal-mining themes, one finds black ubiquitous throughout the pages of this volume. Despite its absence of light, though, the book’s sequence of poems gives the impression that this blackness is not intended as a representation of evil or grief, but instead, a mere fact of everyday routine. By dominating the reader with this single color, the author has subtly insinuated it into the thoughts of his audience, and by doing so, he has successfully paralleled an inescapable truth of West Virginia’s mining belt: black is everywhere.
Intriguing and melancholy, honest and artful, The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go promises a venture into hard but relevant territory. It resonates with ecological concern while capturing one region’s spirit. And not unlike the men and women of its home setting, it can be both sincere and contrary. Perusing the pages of this book will leave the audience with an appreciation for modern comforts and for the sacrificial work ethic of bygone times. Appropriate to read in a single sitting or over several days, The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go offers a unique perspective informed by the past, critical for our present, and hopeful for our future.
William Woolfitt
William Woolfitt is associate professor of English at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. He is the author of Eyes Moving Through the Dark, Ring of Earth, Spring Up Everlasting, Beauty Strip and Charles of the Desert. His fiction chapbook The Boy with Fire in his Mouth won the Epiphany Editions contest. He founded and edits Speaking of Marvels, a gathering of interviews with authors.
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