Raising the Dead by Ron Rash

Raising the Dead Reviews

• 
  Erika Dreifus

  Maybe the only thing more powerful than reading Ron Rash's poems is hearing Ron Rash read them in person. By the time he'd finished "Black-Eyed Susans," from the second section of this book, our entire row was in tears.
• 
  Larry Bassett

  This is the third book of collected poetry by Ron Rash and was published in this book format in 2002. Many of the poems were previously published in journals and magazines. Rash put out a couple of books in quick succession of collected works. Clearing the deck while he has the chance. His popularity has taken off with his recent success of
  Serena. His fans are looking back to his early work, poetry that has its origins in Appalachian Welsh culture.
  
  Dams creating reservoirs that cover the history of an area are a common subject for Ron Rash. Generations of life could not hold off the demand for electric power and the companies that swallowed home and church and field were rabid in their demands. The disappearance of the panther is mulled in many verses as its habitat was threatened. The one-time home of the Cherokee where now all that is left is pottery and arrowheads and bone shards under the depth of the water.
  

  Jocassee is the Cherokee word for a valley in the South Carolina mountains. In the early 1970s, despite fervent opposition by the valley’s inhabitants, Duke Power Company built a dam to create Jocassee Reservoir. Both the living and the dead were evicted, for hundreds of graves were dug up and their contents reburied in cemeteries outside the valley. The reservoir reached full water capacity in 1974. In Cherokee Jocassee means “place of the lost.”

  
  As I read line after line of Ron Rash, the familiarity of place and time increases and I want to know what he has to say about his ancestral home. The rivers are clean and clear. The soil is rich and fertile in some places and rocky in others. The shadows on the north side of the mountain cover the ground at midday. Rash tells the story of the people, his people, who settled and lived and died in the region. The people who lost their way and who found their place in the mountains are found here in the verses. Rash covers the fecundity of new life by man and nature’s seed and the finality of death by age or calamity. I can only imagine what it would be like to experience his poetry as a person living where the words happened. Rash brings a long ago life back from under the water and out of the books.
  
  Raising the Dead is divided into five sections. You can read the poems individually but they do group together with the aid of a master storyteller. I did not try to decipher each story but saw the occasional connection and knew there was more that I could know if I could obtain the eye or ear of the man who gathered the memories and fragrances.
  
  I include this next Ron Rash poem because I am entranced with its imagery. Antietam was a Civil War battle in Maryland and is called “the bloodiest one day battle in American history.” Appalachian mountain people fought on both sides in the Civil War and it left scars on and divisions in the region. Another poem in this book, The Dowry, speaks of this as a “yankee” tries to wed the daughter of a confederate colonel who lost one hand in the Civil War.
  

  ANTIETAM
  The feast huddle explodes when I approach.
  A gray fox remains, whitening to bone.
  The risen wait in the limbs above
  for me to glance the marker, pass on.
  And I imagine their ancestors
  descending the day after battle,
  settling as soft and easy as ashes,
  a shuddering quilt of feather and talon.
  
  Locals swore each anniversary
  those death-embracers found the way back,
  gathered by some avian memory
  to turn September branches black
  as they hunched in rows like a regiment –
  clear-eyed, voiceless, and vigilant.

  
  Ron Rash helps the people hold on to the life that has gone before them whether it is buried under six feet of blood-red dirt or forty feet of clear water.
  

  TREMOR
  Weight of water was what caused
  cups to shiver in cupboards,
  cows to pause, Duke Power claimed,
  but those who once lived there
  thought otherwise, spoke of lives
  so rooted in the valley
  some part of their lives lingered:
  breeze of sickle combing wheat,
  stir of hearth-kettle, the tread
  of mule across the broken ground,
  long ago movements breaking
  across time like a fault line.

  
  Ron Rash is a gift and also gives a gift to the people of the Appalachian region of North and South Carolina in this book. Even without fully understanding the content of all the poems, a reader gradually comes to appreciate the skill of this writer and wants to learn more about what lies in his heart. Four stars even with only a few explanatory notes. Probably five if I had more background.
  
• 
  Tree

  Forthright, often powerful. Rash is a voice for those whose stories had not been given voice to before.
  Ron Rash is criminally underrated and one of the best American poets we have.
• 
  Cathy DuPont

  I love Ron Rash's poetry. One reason, besides the high recommendation from my GR friend Larry Bassett, is because Daddy was from western NC, northern GA and a family cemetery was relocated before the Hiwassee Dam was built.
  
  There are many unknown burials in the Ledford Cemetery. But they are all my family in spirit.
  
  I am so proud to have such close connections to the Smoky Mountains and the people there. They are hard working, religious, good solid people that I'm happy to call family. Ron Rash expressed my feelings so well.
  
  A thanks and nod to my buddy, Larry.
• 
  Pat

  A series of poems mostly centers on Appalachia. Water, ghosts, nature. Having grown up in western NC, the imagery spoke to my heart. The heart and soul of the mountains and its people...
• 
  Tabitha Vohn

  Meh...it just wasn't for me, and that's no fault of the poet.
  
  Raising the Dead is a very accomplished collection that gives insight into rural life in Appalachia. It relies heavily on nature imagery and narrative; both of which are fine...if that's the type of poetry you enjoy.
  
  I prefer a more confessional genre of poetry. The distance that the poet places between himself and the subject matter then left me with a feeling of indifference and an inability to connect to the subject matter. However, those who enjoy poetry from an aesthetic point of view, who prefer form over intense feeling will enjoy this collection. [That's all from a completely opinion-based POV!]
• 
  Alarie

  Waking (5 stars) was more consistently good. In it, as in Rash’s novel, Serena, I was bowled over by his power of description. The early poems in this book seemed to be a bit too straightly narrative and less poetic, but by section II (of V), he won me over again. My favorite metaphor was in finding an old pocket watch in a creek whose “hands do not move, remain still at six-thirty, one placed on the other like dead man’s hands.”
• 
  Gary Sites

  Back in 2005, my Poetry professor and friend, Dick took me to a reading at a community college in Virginia to hear this Rash guy do a reading. I'd never heard of him, but Dick said I'd love him. What I found was a treasure. Ron Rash is one of our best writers. Not only does he write wonderful poetry, but he's a very fine novelist. Can't say enough good things about this author. Meeting this lovely human being, and hearing that comforting Southern accent was almost like coming home again.
• 
  Scott Holstad

  Really boring nature poetry. I bought it because the author taught at the university I attended. However, I was far from impressed and rather glad I never had a class with him. I prefer Bukowski and the Beats, thank you very much.
• 
  Scott Thompson

  I love this book of poems so much that I keep it in the car with me. When I'm waiting for someone or have a few minutes alone I open the book and read a poem or two. Rash has captured the region and the feelings.
• 
  Angela

  If you've never read Ron Rash's poetry, this book is a good place to start, narrative poems with a common theme. I especially liked "Beyond the Dock," "Black Eyed Susans," and "At Reid Hartley's Junkyard."
• 
  Jim Manis

  Read slowly, and pay attention to the low, long, soft vowel sounds.
• 
  TJ

  If you are familiar with any of Ron Rash's works of fiction, you will see ties specific stories here among this collection of poetry.
• 
  Corey

  The themes found in his poetic fiction--death, rural hardships, humanness at ground zero--can also be found in this impassioned collection of interconnected poems.
• 
  Dana Sweeney

  Adjectives that come to mind describing the world of this poetry in western Appalachian North Carolina: unforgiving, cold, indifferent, ruthless, severe, barren, and somehow still painfully loved and familiar. This poetry is about the hardship of a place, and yet it is also clearly Home to its poet. Some of these poems are staggeringly powerful, especially the ones about old towns and homes that have been flooded to the bottoms of lakes by dam & reservoir construction projects (a niche topic that I also write & think about a lot — this is the only time I have encountered writing on this subject by someone else, which was incredible and surprising and instructive).
  
  As someone who has now read a fair amount of Ron Rash, it was really incredible to recognize that some of these early poems evolved into full short stories that were published years later in his collections “Burning Bright” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Reading these poems felt like discovering a prequel that I didn’t know existed before, and it was amazing to see how those beloved stories had unspooled from such compact origins. The fact that many of these poems could easily become full stories speaks to the narrative quality of Rash’s poems.
  
  One substantial drawback that I will mention is my discomfort with how certain groups of people are identified and framed. In two poems, Rash writes of indigenous peoples of western North Carolina as “vanquished” and “vanished,” neither of which are acceptable or accurate terms to describe a living culture that has survived a genocide perpetrated by the people Rash writes about and comes from (hmm). He also uses “a col—ed” to describe a black neighbor in one poem, which I think was intended to date the poem (they are narrated from various times over the past three centuries) but which still felt like a weak and inappropriate artistic choice. I would happily scrap those three poems from an otherwise really strong collection, and I wish he hadn’t included them because they tarnish the rest imo.
• 
  Alice

  Ho un rapporto difficile con la poesia - lo dimostra il fatto che ho una raccolta dei poemi di Robert Frost iniziata nell'estate del 2019 ancora con il segnalibro fermo quasi a metà.
  
  Ron Rash è un autore che con le parole ci sa fare, capace di descrivere perfettamente la natura e l'ambiente circostante - il problema è che con la poesia io ci faccio sempre a botte, soprattutto quando va a capo quando non dovrebbe e il mio cervello perde il filo logico della frase.
  
  Questa è una raccolta di poesie che si concentrano sui Monti Appalachi della Carolina del Sud, sulla vita rurale della comunità, sulla morte e sull'amore.
  Quel Raising the Dead è riferito soprattutto a Jocassee, un lago artificiale con tanto di diga voluto e creato da una compagnia elettrica, e per realizzarlo tutti quelli che abitavano nella valle se ne sono dovuti andare e anche i morti, i loro cari, sono stati riesumati per poi essere seppelliti altrove.
  
  Ron Rash racconta di gente comune - agricoltori, allevatori, pescatori - e in particolare il poema Black Eyed Susans è stato capace di toccarmi il cuore.
• 
  Claudia Mosey

  I want to read Black Eyed Susans