Six O'Clock Mine Report - (Pitt Poetry) by Irene McKinney (Paperback)

About the Book

The speaker in Irene McKinney's poems is most often alone, sitting at the side of a stream, or standing at her own chosen gravesite in the Appalachian mountains, and the meditations spoken out of this essential solitude are powerfully clear, witty, and wide-ranging in content and tone. The center sequence of poems in the Emily Dickinson persona explores and magnifies that great and enigmatic figure. The poems are firmly grounded in concern for the ways in which the elemental powers are at work in the earth and in us: on the surface of our lives, and deeper in the underworld of the coalmines. In McKinney's poems, the human world is never seen as separate from the natural one.

Book Synopsis

The speaker in Irene McKinney's poems is most often alone, sitting at the side of a stream, or standing at her own chosen gravesite in the Appalachian mountains, and the meditations spoken out of this essential solitude are powerfully clear, witty, and wide-ranging in content and tone. The center sequence of poems in the Emily Dickinson persona explores and magnifies that great and enigmatic figure.
The poems are firmly grounded in concern for the ways in which the elemental powers are at work in the earth and in us: on the surface of our lives, and deeper in the underworld of the coalmines. In McKinney's poems, the human world is never seen as separate from the natural one.

Review Quotes

When Irene McKinney writes of the 'black rooms your very body / can move through' or of 'the shaven hilly graves we own. / The babies there / that are not me, ' I am there. I am grateful for the poems that burst forth from her West Virginia roots to shape this fine collection.-- "Maxine Kumin"

About the Author

Irene McKinney has published three previous poetry collections: The Girl with the STone in Her Lap, The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons, and Quick Fire and Slow Fire.