The bloodroot plant with its white flowers that herald spring evokes the deep forests of Appalachia, which are sacred groves for poet Bill King, who grew up in and lived his life in Appalachia. His collection Bloodroot: Poems (Mercer University Press 2023) is a record of this life, one of challenges but sustained joy buoyed by a remarkable empathy for the natural world. A region of almost immeasurable antiquity, its mountains raised by the forces of the earth before the dinosaurs flourished, Appalachia is still pristine in places, and these are the miraculous wild places Bill King’s speaker loves best. By finding his center in the natural world, he shares kinship with a certain sort of writer. Aldo Leopold, in one of his ethical critiques of the modern world in A Sand County Almanac, asks if a higher standard of living “is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.” Mary Oliver said in a 2016 interview she escaped her difficult childhood in Ohio by taking a pencil and notebook into the woods: “I got saved by the beauty of the world.” These two, and others like them who cherish what nature can impart to us, are Bill King’s literary brethren.
Bloodroot‘s first section, titled “Grown Boy,” is an idyllic look back at a childhood in which the speaker desires most to be outside in the woodland, where he finds nature soothing and antidote to his inevitable initiation into grown-up problems. In “Carp” he says of himself and his older brother,
By the time we grew tall enough to see out
the window, into paradise —
…[we were] called to table each evening
to take on our bodies and bow our heads
dear lord, for these and all our blessings,
which as far as we were concerned,
existed beyond the door and down
the hill to the creek along the one-lane…
Henri Bosco said of the child-narrator of his famous novella, The Boy and the River, “As a child, one looks, listens, feels,” calling it a “magic age.” Like Pascalet, Bosco’s narrator, who was lured from the dullness of home into the enchanting wilds of a nearby river — where he stays for a week — as if he were “called,” Bill King’s speaker leaves his home, “the house on the ridge, / between the trillium and bloodroot, / whose petals fall just as soon / as the flower begins to bloom,” to blissfully immerse his senses in the mountain woods. In “The Pond” he says:
I rowed my arms
through late summer grass
before stepping out of the field
and into the rut
the horses made
to gorge on sweet green apples
spotted with mold
The boy in the “Grown Boy” section is already faced with the moral complexities of becoming an adult. In “To the Boy Whose Blood I Shed,” the speaker is distraught at the death of his bloodhound “Dan” whom the boy hears howling from bee stings which soon kill him. The expression of love he has for the dog is heart-tightening for the reader. The boy responds to his dog’s death by acting out in anger and grief and throwing a rock at a neighbor-boy he hears screaming with joy in the nearby creek at the same time his dog howls out the last moments of his life in agony:
I have to tell you:
when I heard your naked joy in the creek
where I had swum and, descending the trail
that runs from the house to the hole,
picked up that perfectly weighted rock —
I let it fly –“
In “Why I Can Stand Here Now Telling You This Story,” The speaker learns to lie after throwing rocks at cars from a ridge with a “smart” friend who later went to jail for robbing a country store. When a “policeman’s tires / churned gravel in the drive an hour later,” Bill King’s speaker denies it was him to both the policeman and his father: “May I be struck dead where I stand, I said / to my father, later, looking square into his smalt- / colored eyes. And because I wasn’t, by him / or God — I turned my back and walked. ”
The adult speaker, who would not shed another’s blood, has a developed and sensitive moral conscience, and these early transgressions obviously stick in his memory like burrs.
As we move from “Grown Boy” through the remaining four sections, we get a sublime “life’s story” of the adult speaker. The first poem, “Songbirds, Midwinter,” of the second section titled “Kite” is another of so many close observations of the natural world. The speaker watches a whistling sparrow, and a chickadee on frog-pond ice that “tips / his cap each time he dips at the base of a leaf / that’s billowed just enough, night-long, / to fashion a crack of water.” The third poem begins a series of poems, never together, which can be called a “cancer diary” within Bloodroot. In this first of those, “Waking Up in Recovery,” we have an unusual marriage of stark and sterile medical imagery with vibrant nature imagery: “A stream of light like noonday sun through canopy / burns my eyes…fingertips bump sternum to pelvis / Staples, someone says — a word I begin to circle like a crow / does a snake in the road.” Later in “Going Down the Hall on a Gurney,” the lips of the nurse leaning over him are flower petals:
Can you tell me your name?
they say, And can you tell me
your date of birth? Yes,
I say, to the white blunt petals
of bloodroot that flutter
as she breathes. I was born
in May, I say to the purple
woods behind them.
I was born in May.
Bill King
His world is disrupted, like it would be for anyone with his diagnosis, but through his mental poesis nature makes a metaphorical “vascular cambium” onto this new, confused (for him) medical world, and even here is able to comfort his psyche. These cancer poems occur in the collection at different times, as his disease progresses. Readers of late twentieth-century poetry will know the book Without by Donald Hall, about his wife Jane Kenyon’s cancer diagnosis and their experience with her disease’s progress until her death, and his attempt to cope after. Without, highly regarded by critics and very beautiful in its way, is a book of despair and an inevitable rendezvous with doom. Bill King, in his determination to live life as completely as he can, doesn’t despair. If anything, his speaker’s pursuit of life’s virtue and beauty is richer and more intense with the knowledge of his disease.
There are some aspects of regret and despair in the book, though. In “A Century After the Battle of Blair Mountain,” in the book’s third section, the speaker takes a train ride to Cincinnati, rolling past so much built infrastructure for a coal industry as old as, older in fact than, the railway that supports it. Outside his hotel in Cincinnati a young man who holds up a “Homeless” sign looks remarkably like a striker the speaker recalls from a black-and-white photograph. In his face he sees “the face of his father and of / his father’s father, who emerged from the ground — again and again –” to supply the country’s insatiable appetite for energy, and regrets how they were too often exploited and never sufficiently rewarded: “with shame to smelt the heart, I say Good morning, brother, / fishing pockets for the least of what any of us should muster.” In “How to Destroy a Mountain,” the speaker depicts mountaintop removal to find coal seams by sharing a harrowing oral history of the practice and its devastating effects on a close by landowner’s generationally held property, framed and intertwined with descriptions of a deceptively simple classroom exercise, “Grades 3-5,” in which children mine coal — chocolate chips from chocolate chip cookies — with toothpicks. The children are being indoctrinated into a push-button acceptance of coal mining and a “Coal Means Jobs,” “Coal Keeps the Lights On” mentality. King’s speaker doesn’t insert himself to sermonize — just juxtaposes the two perspectives — but for a speaker highly sensitive to the slightest loss in nature, even the death of a carp which didn’t have food value, ” I unhooked / and walked him back to water,” (from “Carp”), the reader knows “which side” this Grown Boy is on. For someone like this speaker, the loss of a tree is a tragedy — the loss of a mountain of trees an apocalypse.
Bill King
There are very poignant poems of family in this collection, and Bill King was surely greatly loved. Bloodroot‘s poems are genuinely sincere, and, putting “How to Destroy a Mountain” aside, absent of irony. But King was an obvious fan of Louise Glück’s poetry — a virtuosa of seamless ironic edge control perhaps better skilled than Pope even. His previous collection, The Letting Go, has a poem called “Reading Louise Glück beside the Garden,” and his poem in section three here, “Even the Wild Iris,” is an obvious nod of obeisance to her. Bloodroot is not a religious book, the sole scripture in it its epigraph from Jeremiah (“I have seen the mountains, and here, they are wavering, and all the hills palpitate”), and does not openly inquire about or hope for continuation after death — but there is a kind of spiritual transcendence hinted at in the book in several poems tied to ascent and the poet’s frequent ardor for the flight of birds (even for a vulture’s, making it a dark figure of religious disbelief in “Black Kite”). In “This World Should Be Enough” King’s speaker says, after detailing the rich activity of nature surrounding his walk through the woods: “This world should be enough. But the blue pulls / my eyes skyward, then, and I am rising / above a man with everything to lose: / he’s looking downriver at a thin thread of water, / lit like a slow-burning fuse.” I think this sensation of spirit ascending over and above the body is significant in that humans must leave the world at some point, their lives moving from A to B — birth to death (or B to A, birth to afterlife as some with faith believe). The nature King’s speaker has witnessed and loved over the years is cyclical, forever renewing itself, eternal. King knows at some point he ‘must leave this garden.’ As Louise Glück’s persona of “God” says to humans in her poem “Retreating Wind”:
I gave you all you needed:
bed of earth, blanket of blue air…
Whatever you hoped,
you will not find yourselves in the garden,
among the growing plants.
Your lives are not circular like theirs:
your lives are a bird’s flight
which begins and ends in stillness.”
Bill King’s Bloodroot won the 2023 Weatherford Award for Poetry, bestowed posthumously by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association for the book they believed best illuminated Appalachia that year. His daughter accepted the prize for him at the awards ceremony.
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