William Woolfitt. The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go. Belle Point Press, 2024. Reviewed by Maggie Rue Hess, July 24, 2024.
In William Woolfitt’s latest poetry collection, The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (Belle Point Press, 2024) his Appalachian lyrics render a rich repository of lives, stories, and histories. The book’s tenor runs from bleak to bucolic, but this collection is determinedly unromantic about its landscapes and lore. A firm tether to the past, especially as it relates to mining and extractive industry, pulls out present concerns as Woolfitt navigates how to honestly preserve local stories.
The title poem represents a core ethos of the work. It tells the story of Maria Gunnoe, who became an activist after mountaintop removal led to devastating flooding around her home. The beginning half of the poem pulls you into its wake with a list of consequences she and her family faced, alluding to the pivotal disaster with scenes like, “Before she testified to the House Subcomittee / on Energy and Mineral Resources made congressmen look // at her slides.” The barrage of “Before” moments heightens the temporal distortion attendant on traumatic events, so that when Woolfitt finally describes the “great grinding flood” and “the earth sliding away,” readers are immersed in its urgency. Every space between phrases in this poem becomes the shifting of another slide forward, the blink before “the hill washing down,” the small space to breathe before the next encounter. The ability to hold space for environmental issues and individual stories infuses this and other poems with dignity.
Several recurring features structure the collection, including the playlist of “Track” poems that allude to classic songs and collaged scenes from prominent figures, not always directly named. “Track One: The Wreck on the C. & O.,” written after Jericho Brown, whose musical homages inspired Woolfitt, offers a remarkable sample of narrative portraiture, moving rapidly through rural parataxis to depict the “Clinch Mountain…girl with an autoharp.” With each subsequent track, more musical references accompany other vignettes, populating the world this writing inhabits.
Voices, whether they embody or speak back to external forces, play a major role in pieces such as “A Strange Land” and “The Clay-Eaters.” In the former, notes from an 1873 magazine article written by a “visiting” man intersperse the picture of a town. This visitor applies some chilling phrenological commentary on a “Tennessee wife” he interacts with as he “guesses volume, contour, / and skull lines, appraises // her pure complexion, her brow and chin.” His pseudoscientific observations glaze over her hospitality, the fact that she feeds him. In this way, the community is like the pebble he collects - “its interior / beauties unknowable.”
This void of silence is one of the tensions in the work: there are some things which cannot be known because they will not be spoken to outsiders. “Tongueless” directly depicts that reality through a portrayal of anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, “who means to collect / songs and lies” from a pine woods camp. Escorted by the camp boss, who assures her that “The chippers don’t make up songs,” Hurston senses the caution of the working men. There is too much danger of retribution for them to reveal deeper meanings or share hidden truths that could come back on their company. From a collection that cares so deeply about rendering lived experiences with authenticity, the inclusion of this need for selective silence demonstrates great sympathy.
Much of Woolfitt’s collection engages with “official” documentation about the region in an effort to humanize its people and combat misrepresentation. Working with – and against – source material such as biographical accounts, journalism, and historical documents, he interweaves borrowed language to reveal how narrow perceptions contrast to reality. “Mountain Sweep” exemplifies this endeavor, responding to an epigraph from the 1933 book Hollow Folk: A Study in the Blue Ridge. The poem elucidates how the outsider’s gaze will romanticize (a “pure Anglo-Saxon stock” from “realms of enchantment”) what it also belittles (“unlettered folk…supported by primitive agriculture”). It “[Begins] with a truant child” and depicts the consequences of interventions by external forces, who conform to paternalistic beliefs about these “wild” families.
The poem’s keen attention to language underlines the way misconceptions cause harm. This poem explores the power and carelessness of officials “gathering the children in twos and threes,” taking more than they were told as a “just in case” measure, only to “commit all / to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics / and Feebleminded.” Like the poem’s subjects, readers are (re)moved from the natural surroundings, the Blue Ridge that Woolfitt’s alliteration beautifully represents, to a bleak future of forced labor, bodily maltreatment, and objectification. By the end, the resolution to “beat out degeneracy / and pauperism like dirt from a rug” is shown in all its bald cruelty.
Similarly, pieces such as “Let There Be More Coal,” “Scenes from a Documentary History,” “Coal Creek Litany,” and others work with fragmentary descriptions of the coal mining industry, from its functions to its effects. Between familiar vernacular: “An older miner says, the mine’s so gassy a mile beyond at Helen’s Run you can cook eggs” and specific vocabulary: “crank auger, paper cartridge, powder, lighted squib,” there is a lesson in every line. Everything feels impressively researched, showing Woolfitt’s love for the region by learning it thoroughly, uncovering and conveying its many layers.
The writing is also intensely personal, shown in glimpses with first-person poems like “Benediction.” A good portion of the collection harkens back to Woolfitt’s home state of West Virginia, but this poem revels in his current home: “Tennessee through all the too-hot months / is a lavishment of tiny daisy-like weeds.” Here we read about a son taking joy in “pink flowers” and sharing that joy, even with strangers. As the penultimate poem, it enacts this child’s blessing with a simple reminder to appreciate what goodness the world sustains.
The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go is a self-conscious participant in history-making and -correcting. In a time when more people are growing skeptical of reductive narratives about Appalachia, William Woolfitt’s poetry is a vital addition to the library of experiences within the region.
In William Woolfitt’s latest poetry collection, The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (Belle Point Press, 2024) his Appalachian lyrics render a rich repository of lives, stories, and histories. The book’s tenor runs from bleak to bucolic, but this collection is determinedly unromantic about its landscapes and lore. A firm tether to the past, especially as it relates to mining and extractive industry, pulls out present concerns as Woolfitt navigates how to honestly preserve local stories.
The title poem represents a core ethos of the work. It tells the story of Maria Gunnoe, who became an activist after mountaintop removal led to devastating flooding around her home. The beginning half of the poem pulls you into its wake with a list of consequences she and her family faced, alluding to the pivotal disaster with scenes like, “Before she testified to the House Subcomittee / on Energy and Mineral Resources made congressmen look // at her slides.” The barrage of “Before” moments heightens the temporal distortion attendant on traumatic events, so that when Woolfitt finally describes the “great grinding flood” and “the earth sliding away,” readers are immersed in its urgency. Every space between phrases in this poem becomes the shifting of another slide forward, the blink before “the hill washing down,” the small space to breathe before the next encounter. The ability to hold space for environmental issues and individual stories infuses this and other poems with dignity.
Several recurring features structure the collection, including the playlist of “Track” poems that allude to classic songs and collaged scenes from prominent figures, not always directly named. “Track One: The Wreck on the C. & O.,” written after Jericho Brown, whose musical homages inspired Woolfitt, offers a remarkable sample of narrative portraiture, moving rapidly through rural parataxis to depict the “Clinch Mountain…girl with an autoharp.” With each subsequent track, more musical references accompany other vignettes, populating the world this writing inhabits.
Voices, whether they embody or speak back to external forces, play a major role in pieces such as “A Strange Land” and “The Clay-Eaters.” In the former, notes from an 1873 magazine article written by a “visiting” man intersperse the picture of a town. This visitor applies some chilling phrenological commentary on a “Tennessee wife” he interacts with as he “guesses volume, contour, / and skull lines, appraises // her pure complexion, her brow and chin.” His pseudoscientific observations glaze over her hospitality, the fact that she feeds him. In this way, the community is like the pebble he collects - “its interior / beauties unknowable.”
This void of silence is one of the tensions in the work: there are some things which cannot be known because they will not be spoken to outsiders. “Tongueless” directly depicts that reality through a portrayal of anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, “who means to collect / songs and lies” from a pine woods camp. Escorted by the camp boss, who assures her that “The chippers don’t make up songs,” Hurston senses the caution of the working men. There is too much danger of retribution for them to reveal deeper meanings or share hidden truths that could come back on their company. From a collection that cares so deeply about rendering lived experiences with authenticity, the inclusion of this need for selective silence demonstrates great sympathy.
Much of Woolfitt’s collection engages with “official” documentation about the region in an effort to humanize its people and combat misrepresentation. Working with – and against – source material such as biographical accounts, journalism, and historical documents, he interweaves borrowed language to reveal how narrow perceptions contrast to reality. “Mountain Sweep” exemplifies this endeavor, responding to an epigraph from the 1933 book Hollow Folk: A Study in the Blue Ridge. The poem elucidates how the outsider’s gaze will romanticize (a “pure Anglo-Saxon stock” from “realms of enchantment”) what it also belittles (“unlettered folk…supported by primitive agriculture”). It “[Begins] with a truant child” and depicts the consequences of interventions by external forces, who conform to paternalistic beliefs about these “wild” families.
The poem’s keen attention to language underlines the way misconceptions cause harm. This poem explores the power and carelessness of officials “gathering the children in twos and threes,” taking more than they were told as a “just in case” measure, only to “commit all / to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics / and Feebleminded.” Like the poem’s subjects, readers are (re)moved from the natural surroundings, the Blue Ridge that Woolfitt’s alliteration beautifully represents, to a bleak future of forced labor, bodily maltreatment, and objectification. By the end, the resolution to “beat out degeneracy / and pauperism like dirt from a rug” is shown in all its bald cruelty.
Similarly, pieces such as “Let There Be More Coal,” “Scenes from a Documentary History,” “Coal Creek Litany,” and others work with fragmentary descriptions of the coal mining industry, from its functions to its effects. Between familiar vernacular: “An older miner says, the mine’s so gassy a mile beyond at Helen’s Run you can cook eggs” and specific vocabulary: “crank auger, paper cartridge, powder, lighted squib,” there is a lesson in every line. Everything feels impressively researched, showing Woolfitt’s love for the region by learning it thoroughly, uncovering and conveying its many layers.
The writing is also intensely personal, shown in glimpses with first-person poems like “Benediction.” A good portion of the collection harkens back to Woolfitt’s home state of West Virginia, but this poem revels in his current home: “Tennessee through all the too-hot months / is a lavishment of tiny daisy-like weeds.” Here we read about a son taking joy in “pink flowers” and sharing that joy, even with strangers. As the penultimate poem, it enacts this child’s blessing with a simple reminder to appreciate what goodness the world sustains.
The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go is a self-conscious participant in history-making and -correcting. In a time when more people are growing skeptical of reductive narratives about Appalachia, William Woolfitt’s poetry is a vital addition to the library of experiences within the region.