Song of the Mountains
by John C. Mannone
COMING in 2023!
Song of the Mountains, was conceived when John was awarded the Jean Richie Fellowship in Appalachian literature in 2017.
Song of the Mountains is a poetic celebration, eulogy, metaphor for Appalachia. Sometimes it dances and laughs, but too many times it cries. It’s a vehicle to give voice to creation, a prayer, psalm or hymn of nature. It’s an echo of the past merging with the present. The mountains speak in these songs, the culture of Appalachia—food, family, religion & spirituality, a place of dreams, politics, ecology, and mining, but a place of loss, too, both of its people and their land—the desecration of that land, which is like cursing God. Place is as sacred as family. Depression, a byproduct, runs deep, as a vein of ore in a coal mine. Yet the heart is sometimes blacker than coal searching for the silver and gold threading it like false promises do. Sometimes there are no clear differences. For all the good and evil in our hearts, we love as deeply as we mourn, and that music of the mountains is a salve, as well as a song.
John C. Mannone has poems appearing in Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, and others. He won the Impressions of Appalachia Creative Arts Contest in poetry (2020), was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature, and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His forthcoming collections are Flux Lines: The Intersection of Science, Love, and Poetry (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2021), Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2022), and an e-Chapbook, The Metaphorical Moon through a Poetry Super Highway project (2021). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and three other journals. A retired physics professor, John lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.