Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Interview Poems by Mike and Ruth Yarrow, Photographs by Douglas Yarrow/.../
Voices from the Appalachian Coalfields is a powerful, compelling collection. The found poems of the miners and their spouses along with the photographs of mines and miners combine to bring its readers into the mining community, to feel the challenges of the work, mentally and physically, on the miners and their personal lives. The Yarrows have done a great service by compiling and editing these interviews into poems. These voices have a lot to say about mining life specifically, but also about work and love, and how we all try to balance those things in our daily lives. Their clarity and authenticity, their authority and earned wisdom, and above all, their passion, demand our attention. Jim Daniels, author of Eight Mile High: Stories and Apology to the Moon: Poems"
Synopsis
The separate voices of coal miners, women as well as men, are heard in these interviews recorded half a century ago by Mike and Ruth Yarrow and painstakingly transcribed during the intervening years and put into poetry form. The photographs of Douglas Yarrow deepen the stories here. From the opening words you know the listening won't stop before these voices are brought to the ears of the world. Now here they are--courageous and compassionate despite the undertow of dangerous and unfair realities: a testimony to human dignity . . . from Katharine Boynton Payne, author of Silent Thunder: in the Presence of Elephants
Synopsis
This book contains the voices of Appalachian coal miners, both men and women, and coal miners� wives. Their words are from 225 interviews that my husband and I recorded in the 1970�s and 1980�s in the Appalachian coalfields, largely in Fayette, Raleigh, Mercer and McDowell counties of West Virginia.
As these voices will tell you, underground coal mining is dark, dangerous work. It is a world of totally dark tunnels, often dripping wet, where the only lights are the beams from hard hats. Miners take care not to shine their light in others� eyes. A section of the mine a mine (often referred to as �mines�) may consist of five main entry tunnels, with crosscuts between them, about 100 feet apart. Some will be blocked off with fire-resistant brattice cloth, or more permanently with concrete blocks. These partitions, with the roar of huge fans, force fresh air to the work face and pull dust and dangerous gases out. Near the big machines that mine the coal in the �face� of the section, and pin the �top� or layers above the tunnel, the noise is deafening. Miners communicate with shouts and signals with their headlamps