Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Appalachian Fall: Poems About Poverty in Power
Author: MAIDEN JENNIFER
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 01/01/2018
Imprint: CONSIGNMENT STOCK
Price: $21.00
Publishing status: Active
This is a major new poetry collection, focusing on poverty, power and the ways in which they are interconnected and intrinsic to each other. The theme of ‘Appalachian Fall: Poems About Poverty in Power’ was inspired partly by the situation in last year’s American Presidential Campaign, in which President Trump’s victory was dependent on voters from impoverished and threatened regions, such as Appalachia. The ‘fall’ in the title, the American autumn season, is a metaphoric setting surrounding these poems. Here, ‘fall’ can be also a technical fall, a drop in poll numbers, a spiritual decline or a dancer leaping from a pas de deux.
The poems in this collection act as a platform between the heights and depths of hierarchy, letting the reader, poet and characters look power in the eyes with a level gaze.
Pacing his gold-toned oval office, President Trump speaks in a parallel duet with his immigrant mother. In a hotel room in San Francisco, Hillary Clinton regains her sense of self with Eleanor Roosevelt. On a Sydney beach, Labour Leader George Lansbury greets his granddaughter, Angela, welcomes her political support, and a mystery writer she portrays on television, but wonders why his remote relative Malcolm Turnbull is there. From a metaphorical wilderness, a holiday house by the South Coast sea, Maiden’s characters, Clare Collins, who murdered her siblings as a child, and George Jeffreys, her ex-probation officer and partner, look at the American covert deep state, the Overton window, Trump and Russia, while they look after their newborn son, Corbyn, who was named after the UK Labour leader.
At President Trump’s Inauguration, Jimmy Carter analyses the politics of Appalachian values with his cousin, the singer Sara Carter. In Georgia, at his home, he is cheered by conversations with Dylan Thomas. In Sydney, Jane Austin crosses time to drink Kevin Rudd’s tea with Tanya Plibersek. Through Irish streets and French, Nora Barnacle or a young Brigitte Bardot use poverty as a form of integrity. Tony Abbott is immobilised by his opposing stance on same-sex marriage until Queen Victoria reasons with him, and in a Don Quixote library, Gough Whitlam signs the guestbook. One Poem addresses the policy of Solitary Confinement in a Western Suburbs juvenile detention institution.
This book establishes even more remarkably that Maiden is, as Professor Robert Adamson has described her, ‘the great poet of our humanity’.
ISBN: 9780995418172