Jennifer Maiden’s Appalachian Fall

Jennifer Maiden, Appalachian Fall: Poems about Poverty in Power (Quemar Press 2017)

Quemar Press published the ebook of Jennifer Maiden’s  Metronome the day after the 2017 US presidential election. In its last poem, Maiden’s fictional alter egos George Jeffreys and Clare Collins watch the election results on TV, and chat to Donald Trump on the phone. One insistent strand of Appalachian Fall is a continuation of the Trump theme.

Jimmy Carter chats with his re-awakened distant cousin Sara Carter Bayes at Trump’s inauguration. Jane Austen comments on his rivalry with Kim Jong-Un. Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton chat about him.  Trump himself appears with George Jeffreys, with his mother, Mary Anne Macleod, and solo.

Maiden’s lively, questioning intelligence worries away at the double mystery of Trump: who is he and what happened to make him President? The book’s subtitle, ‘Poems of Poverty in Power’, gestures towards her answer to the second question: Jimmy Carter, reflecting on Sara’s music, articulates it:

thought: we knew ourselves when we heard it:
the low gut scream of hunger,
for some food, some pride, for any sort of
civilising action, answered passion, and if all
these people were Trump voters, maybe that in fact
was why he couldn’t despise their desperation.

Maiden addresses the first question –’who is he?’– with something approaching compassion, or at least an attempt to understand the human being, which is a kind of poetic heroism. Just as, years ago, she made poetry from her observations of George W Bush’s nose and Kevin Rudd’s pursed lips, in ‘Wind-rock’ she makes us see Donald Trump’s characteristic walk, and so the man himself, with fresh eyes:

 brace and blend into a finish. Trump’s erratic pace
wind-rocked staggers stubborn with its hunching
at growth and gust in air and no escape.

There’s a lot more than Trump here, but I won’t attempt a proper review. I’ve spent far too long on this blog post already, partly because I keep rereading the poetry – I love the sound of Jennifer Maiden’s voice, even when, occasionally, I don’t get what she’s saying or think she’s way off the mark. And partly because, well, see the next paragraph. For an excellent review, I recommend Magdalena Ball’s at Compulsive Reader.

So this is what took me too much time. There’s an extraordinary wealth of reference in Maiden’s poetry: to the Australian poetry scene past and present, poetry in general, politics in Australia, the US, the UK and Catalonia, art, music, the publishing industry, TV shows, movies, famous and little-known political and cultural figures. I thought it would be interesting to put together a visual representation of the intricate web of associations and connections created in this book, and produced the slide show below, which is still not exhaustive).

Enjoy. And then read the book. Quite a lot of it is up on Quemar’s website as a PDF.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Though I read Appalachian Fall last year I’m counting it as my first book  for the 2018 Australian Women Writers Challenge.