Appalachian Mettle

by Paul Bennett and Paul Lewis Bennett

Book by Bennett, Paul, Savage, Michael P., Latimer, Harriet D. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1886028273
• ISBN13: 9781886028272
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Savage Press (WI)
• Length: 170 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Two decades work from an Ohio poet

Paul Bennett (1917-2002) was the poet-teacher at Denison University for forty years, essentially from 1949 to 1985. He also wrote fiction, and his complete published work includes a novel from the early Sixties, Robbery on the Highway, two others, from the late Sixties, The Living Things, and from the early eighties, Follow the River, as well as a non-fiction work again from the latter period, Max: Tale of a Waggish Dog. His poems were collected in two books from the early Seventies, and in the present volume, Appalachian Mettle. This is a volume that deserves to stay in print, for its spare and shrewd lyricism, as well as its narrative spell -- each in their own way considerable. The volume is divided, about equally, between the lyrics, often with the poet-speaker's garden/orchard, or family, in the foreground, and craft very much at the heart of the concern; and the narrative poems, about World War II and the building of a house, are concerned with the community matrices into which the individual finds his own patterns of self-reliance subject. There's a high New England strain in the work, and indeed Bennett was student in Cambridge in the late Forties, around the time of the break through of American Studies there. Bennett's poetry is one of that background's quiet gems.