Underground Singing by Harry Humes – A book review for Father’s Day, 2014

Published: December 21, 2007 [125 copies]

Seven Kitchens Press

Second printing: July, 2008 [100 copies]

19 pages, 4.625 x 6.75 inches

ISBN: 978-0-9820372-0-1

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Reviewed by Diane Sahms-Guarnieri 

UNDERGROUND SINGING (Winner of the 2007 Keystone Chapbook Prize) contains seventeen detailed narrative poems framed within Girardville, Pennsylvania, an eastern coal town setting.  These poems are mined together into the larger scope of a story.

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Harry Humes’s pieces of memories are stitched together into one reflective whole, where the center holds.  It’s inspiring to read for its honesty and brilliant attentiveness to metaphoric detail.  There’s not a word left dangling, rather a crystal clear recollection – like an underground spring sparkling in discovery, as underground consciousness streams its way into conscious realism, through his words, through his poems, through his singing of childhood memories. Breath breathed from coal dust – into life – and then returning once again to dust.

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This collection begins with “Man With a Yellow Pail.” The man is walking somewhere… up the hill / toward a house, maybe his own house. Planned or unplanned, what a great way to start a small collection, the arduous climb upward – life’s many hills and then the sound of the pail squeaking.  The reader is drawn in to this first poem by sensory perception: visual, auditory, and tactile.  The continuation of visual description plays on as Time has passed, It was late March, and a naturalistic setting with mallards or wood frogs quaking on the vernal pond.  An enigma pursues as the contents inside the pail are unknown, dandelions or forsythia beautiful springtime yellows, these harbingers of spring juxtaposed with or fish worms?  Yes, it’s fishing season and sure it could be worms.  And then Humes adds his own personal adaptation (something that I as a reader had no former knowledge of, something uniquely Humes to his familial upbringing) – maybe animal guts for some cheerless reading. In addition, to adding the sensation of smell, that is, scent of flowers and stink of worms and animal guts, the reader may ask – Who reads animal guts? (The poet answers this question, with a different twist, his father a reader of pigeon bones in lieu of animal guts in “The Bone Reader,” which will be addressed later).  For now, the reader is freed from that question, because in the next lines the man in Humes’s poem is raising  …his free arm / into the sky, palm and fingers tilted upwards, / as if expecting something to land there.  Again the reader questions – What would land there?

Then, the unanswered question, followed by rain as cleansing, rain as an breathed in, an olfactory sensation:  The air smelled like rain pocking dusty weeds,/ and the moon floated low in the west, and the careful and perfect placement of the last line –

everything on edge, waiting to spill.

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This is a hook of an opener, to a chapbook of poems loaded with detailed sensory perception, a lived-narrative of life in a rural setting.  Another poem “Polka for Three Dancing Elephants” is about Polish women dancing together “The Beer Barrel Polka” or “The Pennsylvania Polka” …at wedding receptions / at Ranger’s Fire House or St. Vincent’s Hall.  This is a throwback to receptions once held in fire halls, and there is no political correctness here, as there wasn’t any then.  Just life for life’s sake, the way it was growing up in “Ash Alley,” Humes a survivor of those by-gone days, destined to sing its underground music of the days of freedom and despair, from “Ash Alley:”

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 … I know there was always coughing / and wasn’t there always someone calling our name.

to “Slush Dam:”

 …You’ve been at that sulfur-stinking place, haven’t you, haven’t you? our mother would shout.  If you sink in it, we’ll never find you.  Mummies is what you’ll be. Do you hear me?…

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            There’s this romantic nostalgia of looking back in Time and realizing what kind of place it really was, while growing up, and that you lived through those days to come back years later in your mind and write about it, for others to understand where you have come from – the beautiful and the ugly, the pain and the joy, and that special something that was rather unique to you and your family, community.  “The Bone Reader” (is the poem I referred to earlier) of which, the entire first stanza cannot be spared here for that reason:

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                        Down in the cobwebbed dirt cellar

                        With coal bin, buckets of nails, crosscut saws,

                        Down there was a shoe box filled with pigeon bones

                        That my father would spill out on the kitchen floor

                        And read things in the tangle

                        Of breast bones, ribs wing bones, skulls

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And then the final stanza:

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                        But not a hint or click of movement,

                        and me remembering that moment my father

                        turned to us and asked if we had heard

                        and we said yes.

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Why lie, because Humes understood in innocence, in childhood wisdom, that his father’s dangerous and long hours of hard work, underground, in the darkness was one of life’s worst occupations,  and because Humes respected his father,  …and because he(Humes’s father) was a man skilled with darkness, / an underground man effortlessly finding his way / through coal veins…. His father told them…Oh yes, / I hear things down there / in creaking and drop of water, / we believed him. 

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That’s why; because this underground singing is a childhood memory and yes, Harry Humes lived on to read the bones of his father’s death with a beautifully sad innocence – with love – never sparing life’s darkness, never sparing America of its dirty coal dust lung: a sound of singing and/or coughing?  This is “American Realism” …down there in the muck, / down there steadily finding its way. 

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The last four lines of the last poem in Humes’s prized chapbook, “My Ravine,” …putting my hand against the cool walls / for a kind of direction, maybe asking / one last dumb question, and eating / a little dirt so I would never forget.

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UNDERGROUND SINGING, a written testament of a life, of a time, he remembers.

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You can find the book here: http://sevenkitchenspress.com/our-authors/harry-humes/

-Diane Sahms-Guarnieri is the Poetry Editor of The Fox Chase Review and Publisher of The Fox Chase Review Broadside Series.

http://www.dianesahms-guarnieri.com/