Alchemy (review) (1996)

Impressive overall, this collection is especially useful because it includes close reading of less frequently examined works, such as The Weedkiller's Daughter and The Kentucky Trace. Chung herself discusses the short stories, published and unpublished, showing how their artistry and themes prefigure the novels. The strongest new scholarship is Beth Harrison's serious look at Arnow's second novel, which has remained unpublished. Harrison sees "Between the Flowers" as an important "link in the evolution of both Arnow's canon and the development of her female characters" and as part of a tradition which Harrison calls "female pastoral" in which "rural women characters finally become the heroes of their own novels." Clearly, on Arnow's unpublished manuscripts alone, there is stimulating work yet to be done. Arnow's own words in the final section, entitled "Authorial Views," help us to understand her characters, especially her female characters, and to discern the importance of her reading in preparation for writing, her careful attention to language, her writing process and purpose. Arnow speaks of herself and her work critically, humbly, often with selfdeprecating humor. Near the end of "Help and Hindrances in Writing: A Lecture," she shapes a motto that sums up her writing philosophy: "Be true to thyself and thy parish." With the blend of old and new criticism, the interview of Arnow, reprints of two lectures and her preface to Mountain Path, these pieces talk to each other, complement and challenge each other, and pave the way for further examination of Arnow. Despite the generally accepted view, Arnow was neither a one-novel writer nor merely a regionalist. Her work has an integrity and complexity that always accentuates her focus on community and identity, her earnest social conscience, and her perceptive view of women and their lives in Appalachian and American experience. Along with this important collection of essays, the forthcoming collection of Arnow's short stories, also edited by Chung, and the biography by Sandra L. Ballard should bridge Arnow's passage to more widespread reading, research, and recognition. —Dorothy Hopkins Schnare Wildsmith, Dana. Alchemy. Abingdon, Virginia: The Sow's Ear Press, 1995. 32 pages. $6.00. Medieval alchemists failed repeatedly to turn base metals into gold. But in the twenty-four poems of this remarkable debut, Dana Wildsmith 64 succeeds repeatedly, through the alchemy of metaphor, in transforming the common and everyday into the extraordinary and precious. The opening poem, a verbal portrait called "Annie in the Morning," is impressive for the way its metaphors move seamlessly from the concrete to the abstract and back, from the general to the particular: When Annie gets up in the morning she is a muslin slip, a bone button. Who could argue with her neatness? Her skin is a Quaker dress addressing the daylight. She is all of a piece with the plain light of morning. If she were a bird, she'd be a thrush. When Annie washes her face, her mirror hums a brown little tune and thinks of other things. Look at Annie brushing her hazy hair. She is milk on oatmeal. She is butter on toast. The deft transformations of "Annie in the Morning" foretell the verbal alchemies to be discovered in subsequent poems in this collection as the ordinary suddenly becomes strange and wondrous. In "Annie Adjusts," before she awakens to a five-mile run: through Ode Pepper's tobacco fields and past rows of Ode's cows where their watering creek cuts through a truck-rut path down a hill long gone to nettles and Queen Anne's lace while low in November sun laps at the hems of her quilts, Annie drifts back to a dream of sailing tall ships trimmed out with Victorian organdy gowns. 65 (It is Queen Anne's lace that bridges subtly from the tobacco fields, cows, creek and truck-rut path to the tall ships and the Victorian gowns.) As in the two Annie poems, there is a sensitivity to light and color in "Nightwalk," where . . . your sleep-curved hand shines like a moon on the sheet between us lightening it like a beach at moonrise. There is no wasted motion in these poems. The transformations are sudden...