"At Home In The Mountains Poems" by Ken Slone--Book Review

Slone, Ken, Illustrated by Tom J. Whitaker. At Home In The Mountains (Ashland, KY, Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2001)

Ken Slone was a professor of English for several years at Big Sandy Community and Technical College in Prestonsburg, Kentucky.  So far as I know he is retired.  I am unable to determine whether or not he is still teaching or even alive.  The website at the college does little to inform anyone about the faculty, their credentials, or biographical information.  The biographical statement in the book states that this is his third book of poetry but does not list others by name.  Ken Slone apparently grew up in Johnson County Kentucky and received a graduate degree from Xavier University.  

The illustrator, Tom J. Whitaker, was a professor of art at the same junior college for many years and has lived most, if not all, of his life in Magoffin County Kentucky.  He maintains the website linked here and is well known for his paintings and prints of nostalgic scenes from the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia.  

While I enjoyed reading this book, I was not compelled to devour it as I often am with books I love. This poetry will never be considered "great".  Some of it is not much more than ordinary.  But it is highly readable and will elicit warm memories for the reader who has spent a lifetime in the mountains of Central and Southern Appalachia, especially in the Big Sandy River Valley.  I was motivated by the book to remember people, places, events, and incidents from my own life as an Appalachian native and writer.  I remembered corn shucking, milking the old cow, watching my Aunt Ida Hicks cook on a coal stove in the head of Bear Fork in Knott County Kentucky.  I remembered watching my father and mother perform the daily chores of life in the mountains.  I will not sell this book.  I will not give it away.  I will keep it and I might even pick it off the shelf and reread it some day.  As a writer in Appalachia, I know that sometimes that is all an author can expect from a reader.  If you have a desire to take a slow stroll back through your childhood as a native Appalachian this book can point the way for you.  You will find lines in it which will bring a smile to your craggy old face.  It will help you remember that old neighbor down the road who died alone in a rundown clapboard house by the side of a mountain creek.  That probably is all you ask from a book.