Appalachian Spring

Spring breaks across Appalachia.
One morning dawn light dazzles;
hens cluck in the hen house
and the backyard magnolia
froths with pink-lipped petals,
like salmon leaping fervently
against a waterfall’s white hem.
Come next daybreak, grass blades
glitter in a killing frost;
the shock of scattered blossoms spreads
severed hands in mute applause.

The Sinks

Something in us sinks,
density of mountains
in the hip bones. We’ve grown
sludge-hearted, carbon-veined.
Slurry ponds rising behind our ribs.
We do not float so well,
a people raised on dark
swift rivers. There’s not a lake
in West Virginia not made
by man, bulldozed and dammed,
or engineered for containment of spoil.
Trout stocked deep with cancer.
Cadmium, arsenic, lead, and zinc
leach into the tables, the water
we drink. We sink and we sink.
Send not a flood o Lord.

Landscape with Two Figures

Whatever soreness is
in my body when I rise
from picking snap peas
and hauling irrigation lines
in the midday heat
to look at you across the strawberry field
is a signal flare, a gulp
of swallows lifting all at once,
sweeping through the light.

Released February 12, 2019

Reckonings

Poems by Ryan Walsh

There is a price for progress. In his debut collection, centered around the cracked industrial-pastoral of Appalachia, Walsh asks who rung up the ecological tab and who will be implicated by this line of questioning. Above the banks of polluted rivers and decimated communities, a harvest of mountain and man, a bounty of pine and cellular towers have been reaped. There are those complicit in the sowing of such rewards, and through stunning syntax and mapping the bucolic’s role in the creation of present and future, Walsh asks if the means can justify the ends. Who is accountable when noble intentions irreparably wound the hidden corners of the Earth? Among these poems is a life lived in the shadow of technological progress and urban advantage. These poems plot the broken places, add topography to the image reflected in the shattered screen of a smart phone, and unite humanity in a shared culpability while also celebrating the perseverance and persistent beauty of the natural world.

Read Ryan Walsh’s craft talk with fellow Red Ochre poet, Allison Pitinii Davis on the Baoblog.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan Walsh was born and raised in West Virginia. He is the author of two chapbooks, Reckoner (2015) and The Sinks (winner of the 2010 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest), and his poems have appeared in several journals, including Blackbird, Ecotone, Field, Forklift, Ohio, Green Mountains Review, and Narrative. He earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA from Warren Wilson College, and he has received grants and scholarships from the Vermont Arts Council and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has taught creative writing and literature at Albion College, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and at the Champlain College Young Writers’ Conference. After working at Vermont Studio Center for many years, where he directed the writing residencies program, he now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Advance Praise

“Reckonings is a beautiful elegy for our country, our landscape, our days. Terrified by what we have made, infuriated by our wrongheadedness, Ryan Walsh, nevertheless finds beauty in terror, beauty in the grief, beauty in our attempt to witness the crimes we commit daily against the world that surrounds us. How does he do it? Perhaps because lyricism, image-making, whisper, half-whisper, all possess the magnetic power of sustaining one, when all else fails. When America fights its own people, its own landscape, what is the poet to do? Ryan Walsh offers us the song of Reckonings, a song that refuses to let go. Beautiful, moving work.”

“There is a whole young lifetime represented in Ryan Walsh’s first collection. Reckonings is as much about coming to terms with his West Virginia past as it is about the pastoral vision of those terms. Walsh’s poems are distillations as well as romances of memory and the ‘settlement of accounts.’ The discipline and intelligence of the writing shines through everywhere as the poet places each rung of his formal ladder between the working earth and stardust.”

“In language rich and sinewy, with a terse energy and an evocative music, Ryan Walsh establishes his mastery as a poet of place.  He embraces a love of the elemental, of earth and weather and landscape, of rural people and working-class life.  Always accessible, bristling with sensual clarity, his poems nevertheless retain a sense of mystery and enigma that teases the reader into thought.”

“Ryan Walsh’s Reckonings makes plain that the hurt earth, which includes the people hurt by the earth’s hurting, resides in our imaginations and bodies.  But by naming that sorrow, by turning it over, he makes a garden.  And with that garden he feeds us.”

“Ryan Walsh’s Reckonings is a heartbreaking love song to his homeplace in the ‘company town’ of Spelter, West Virginia, and an unabashed lament for the lives he saw consumed there. A worthy descendant of James Wright and Philip Levine, Walsh’s poems are peopled with zinc smelters and swing shifters, who ‘knew what it was to be lifted again, / to wrestle with the terrible angel, / and to have prevailed another day.’ Reckonings is a poignant, powerful debut, which bears witness to both the anguish and the towering endurance of post-industrial America.”

“The deft, moving lyrics of Reckonings attempt to account for the slow violence of Appalachia’s industrialization – particularly its twin legacies of exploitative labor and toxic waste pollution – while also positioning us in meaningful relation to this violence, the ‘Risk published in the air’ by corrupt corporations. It’s impossible work, making meaning out of the willful destruction of the working class and of the Earth, but Ryan Walsh mounts a passionate defense of the too often overlooked and devalued lives and landscapes of West Virginia.”

Book Details

Title: Reckonings

Author: Ryan Walsh

Publication Date: February 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-936097-23-4

Red Ochre Edition

$17.95

Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123

Available at your favorite local bookstore, on Indiebound.com, or from Baobab Press affiliate Sundance Books and Music

Scheduled Readings

  • March 2, 2019 – Book Launch w/ Ann Pancake – White Whale Bookstore at 7pm – 4754 Liberty Ave, Pittsburgh, PA
  • March 28, 2019 – Vermont Studio Center Alumni Reading & Happy Hour w/ Nandi Comer and Zayne Turner– Dig A Pony at 4pm – 736 SE Grand Ave, Portland, OR
  • May 9, 2019 – Reading w/ Michael Dickman – White Whale Bookstore at 7pm – 4754 Liberty Ave., Pittsburgh, PA
  • October 6, 2019 – Poetrio Series – Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe – 55 Haywood Street, Asheville, NC

Ryan in the News