For I am Mountainborn
“Each verse is a haiku droplet distilled from clearing mountain mists.”
For I am Mountainborn, by Lenore McComas Coberly, is sublime. Open this book to any page and sink into beauty. Each verse is a haiku droplet distilled from clearing mountain mists. One is reminded of William Blake’s dictum: ‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet.’ Coberly, a lovely, gracious and eternally young West Virginia mountaineer in her nineties, has written, to put it simply, a great collection of poems.
This author shows us that mountain people cannot be separated from their landscapes, that they are connected in infinitely complex ways to their mountains, the animals who call it home, the trees on its slopes and those beings which climb them.
Her rural storytelling has a global essence, countries become compressed as she recognizes in the Chinese laborer pulling his cart behind him on steep roads in the city of Changsa, China, the dignity of a mountain man, a lost tradition plodding alongside the motorized vehicles passing him by on the busy street of today’s world.
The last poem in her poetry collection, titled “Changsa,” is an ode to this laborer and ends with these words: “I think I know this man, this place, for I am mountainborn.”
The legendary poet Li Bai might have appreciated Coberly’s deep, empathetic nature and sense of global kinship with China halfway across the earth—far from her ancestral home in Lincoln County, West Virginia. A mountaineer himself, in his poem, “Green Mountain,” he writes, “I have a world apart that is not among men.” When asked why he dwells in the green mountain he smiles and makes no reply, “for my heart is free of care.”
The poems in For I am Mountainborn have appeared in dozens of magazines, books and anthologies and have drawn critical acclaim. Lee Smith, New York Times bestselling author of Guests on Earth, is “utterly swept away” by her beautiful poems which “manage to be plainspoken yet profound, down-home and deeply sophisticated all at once. They bring back cow paths, broom sage, pawpaws, lilacs blooming around porches, yet Coberly is not lost in nostalgia, and these poems are anything but sentimental.”
Unlike the poems of Jo Carson, her poems also lack the scoldings, drama and cliches one sometimes expects from the genre of rural storytelling (such as the use of the word “ain’t”). Coberly only uses the vernacular in one poem, quite unlike Carson’s “Mountain People,” from her book, Stories I ain’t Told Nobody Yet, with the drama of “living on cow peas, fat back and twenty acres straight up and down.”
Neither are Coberly’s poems anything like George Sterling’s mountain poetry in which he concerns himself with the enormity, austereness and malevolence of mountains—one of which he describes as a “shape of ancient fear.”
One must thank the friends and family of Coberly for the publication of For I am Mountainborn. As the author writes in her Acknowledgements, a manuscript group met at her home for twenty-seven years, providing advice and moral support. “Then, one winter night by the fire, part of my family looked at a stack of my poems and said they wanted it published, encouraging a poet of my age to go for it.”
Coberly thanks her readers and hopes that something in her book will speak to us. Her poems have universal appeal and would make a wonderful addition to anyone’s book collection. A perfect gift.
As long as she lives, Coberly will write for us. She goes nowhere without a little notebook and finds poems everywhere, whether “on streets or hanging from trees.” One can imagine her walking mountain paths, chewing on the tropical-tasting pawpaw and spitting out its black seeds. Notebook in hand, she tells it true.
For I am Mountainborn, written by Lenore McComas Coberly. Fireweed Press 2014, www.fireweedpoetry.com.
