Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
Winter 1997
Abstract
The University of Nebraska Press has given us a gift by republishing Harriette Simpson Arnow's Flowering ofthe Cumberland. Though much has changed in the fields of history writing and literary non-fiction in the intervening decades, rereading Arnow reminds us that good prose is always in style and that good stories never die.
Juanita Brown Tobin's Ransom Street Quartet is a half-successful book of poems. And since the other half is less a failure than a curiosity, the whole is worth reading. Fortunately the book leads with its strength.
In Johnny's Cosmology, North Carolina poet John York presents his own engaging angle of the Appalachian vision—an angle that continually modifies and changes its focus as the book progresses. That he achieves a consistent aesthetic effect through such broad variations in voice and persona testifies to the poet's craft and the volume's success.
Recommended Citation
Jolliff, Bill, "Book Review: Flowering of the Cumberland , and: Ransom Street Quartet: Poems and Stories , and: Johnny's Cosmology" (1997). Faculty Publications - Department of English. 41.
https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/eng_fac/41
Comments
Originally published in Appalachian Heritage 25.1 (Winter 1997): 65-73.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aph.1997.0058