Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam
“Written in the voices of people living and working in the coal camps during the West Virginia coal mine wars of 1920–1921, these vivid poems show how a community responded to a time of danger. Kettle Bottom imagines the stories of miners, their wives, children, sisters, and mothers; of mountaineers, Italian immigrants, and African American families — people who organized for safe working conditions in opposition to the mine company owners and their agents. The poet, Diane Gilliam, whose family was part of the Appalachian outmigration from Mingo County, West Virginia, and Johnson County, Kentucky, has created a book of poems that address a violent time with honesty, levity, and compassion. At its core, Kettle Bottom is about how a community lived in the presence of multiple risks and the choices the residents made.”
Explosion at Winco No. 9
Delsey Salyer knowed Tom Junior by his toes,
which his steel-toed boots had kept the fire off of.
Betty Rose seen a piece of Willy’s ear, the little
notched part where a hound had bit him
when he was a young’un, playing at eating its food.
It is true that it is the men that goes in, but it is us
that carries the mine inside. It is us that listens
to what they are scared of and takes
the weight of it from them, like handing off
a sack of meal. Us that learns by heart
birthmarks, scars, bends of fingers,
how the teeth set crooked or straight.
Us that picks up the pieces.
Us that picks up the pieces.I didn’t have
nothing to patch with but my old blue dress,
and Ted didn’t want floweredy goods
on his shirt. I told him, It’s just under your arm,
Ted, it ain’t going to show.
Ted, it ain’t going to show.They brung out bodies,
you couldn’t tell. I seen a piece of my old blue dress
on one of them bodies, blacked with smoke,
but I could tell it was my patch, up under the arm.
When the man writing in the big black book
come around asking about identifying marks,
I said, blue dress. I told him, Maude Stanley, 23.
Like the Michelangelo of her poem who ‘cuts away everything from the stone that is not David,’ Diane Gilliam makes the stone of the West Virginia mountains yield up its human past, and gives a second, enduring life through her art to the people of her home place, who would otherwise be ‘all gone under the hill.’ Her community is fortunate to have harbored such a poet, and American poetry is the larger for this extraordinary book.
— Eleanor Wilner
The poems in Kettle Bottom deliver, with the simplicity of homespun, details about coalfield faith, childhood, family, workplace danger, bias, marriage and — again and again — economic injustice. Gilliam’s collection is a profoundly human portrait that rings out beyond the folds of a lost Appalachian story. [It is] an inquiry into coal that returned with diamonds.
—Daily Hampshire Gazette
Kettle Bottom serves as a reminder that everything in life can be the stuff of poetry, that every life is extraordinary in some way and has something to teach us.
—Appalachian Heritage