Bloodroot

The poems in Bill King's first full-length collection, Bloodroot, articulate a life grounded in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains. We see memories of his youth in southwestern Virginia's Back Creek Valley, as well as poems of adult years in (and exploring the Monongahela Forest that surrounds) the mountain town of Elkins, West Virginia. These poems follow the root of a life nourished by and inseparable from garden soil, mountain rivers, and the hearths and kitchen table of home back to its origins. ""Grown Boy"" recalls a solitary childhood spent exploring creeks and two-lanes. In ""Black Kite,"" a mature father's sense of home and family take on depth and gratitude after a cancer diagnosis and chronic illness. Poems like ""This World Should Be Enough"" look beyond personal mortality to honor the mystery and beauty of wild landscapes long threatened by the violence of the extraction industry. Finally, ""To Have and To Hold"" pledges fealty to love in all of its forms, a stance that makes the book's meditations on mortality and acceptance, especially ""Fifty Gardens In"" as hopeful as they are honest. By turns narrative and lyrical, these accessible poems find metaphor in native landscapes: ""the pink and purple riddles"" of joe pye and ironweed, a ""cicada, / like a pressure canner thrumming on a stove,"" the red-tail hawks that ""carry the wounded skyward,"" the bloodroot ""whose petals fall just as soon / as the flower begins to bloom."" King's poems offer a language for how to love a world we must, ultimately, leave.