Daniel Boone's Window: Poems(Southern Messenger Poets)

Daniel Boone's Window, a new book of poetry by Matthew Wimberley, meditates on the past and future of contemporary Appalachia through explorations of both mythologized and actual landscapes. In poems that confront a region indelibly shaped by environmental turmoil, economic erasure, and the weight of an outside world intent on destroying it, Daniel Boone's Window works to reclaim and reckon with the realities and complexities of Appalachia. Wimberley's poetry seeks to dispel monolithic narratives of the region by capturing the rugged and the beautiful, approaching place with wonderment that subverts stereotype and blame.

About the Author :
Matthew Wimberley lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. His collection All the Great Territories won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Orion, Poem-A-Day, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.

Review :
Matthew Wimberley possesses an uncanny ear: he listens to ghosts, nuthatches, blood, ridges, sorrow, beeches, and to the 'run-on sentence of a creek.' This listening is an intimacy with inheritance and Appalachia. This listening is rich with astonishing connections and leaps: the 'clang of snow-chains' turns into the music of a carousel and light is retooled into a 'scalpel of an undertaker.' Compassionate and achingly precise, Wimberley's second book is remarkable--his immense gifts as a poet shine on every page.-- "Eduardo C. Corral" Shadows, tinfoil, turpentine, and suicides in the river--Matthew Wimberley's poems draw up sorrowful skeletons from a dark pool, sluicing water from them, bringing them into brilliant light. There are small-town collapses here, rendered as the epics they are from the interior: extinctions, inheritance, generations of forgetful and forgotten men scattered like ashes through the stanzas. There are heroes here, unfaithful, their sons standing stranded by the school, waiting to be remembered and brought home. Wimberley's skills as a carpenter of verse are showcased as he strips their stories down for telling, removing the gleaming veneer of romanticism to reveal the clean pine of the roadside marker. The poems of Daniel Boone's Window call to the wandering dead, using the rhythms of regretted speeches and echoing shouts. They catalogue the wilderness while sawdust leaks out, offering depictions of a gone world, but gone only lately, not yet obliterated, and perhaps, given the right ministrations, capable of resurrection.-- "Maria Dahvana Headley"