I bought this book to assist my teaching 7th graders about Southern literature and folklore, and I was not disappointed. The subject matter was interesting and appropriate for children. For my own enjoyment, however, I would have preferred something that seemed more authentic, especially in terms of dialect and my Southern Appalachian culture.

I am a direct descendent of the Hatfields of West Virginia. My 3rd great granddfather migrated west and settled in the town of Mossyrock, WA. The good in this book is its focus on the lore of the two families. The stories have been passed down from generation to generation. Who did what to whom and how they related to each other. The bad is its lack of attention to the sociology of the feud: was it really family honor or is the poverty of the region to blame? What about the federal governments interference? We hear so much about the ATF/FBI at Waco, but the federal government was a critical factor in the feud in its later years. My grandfather moved to Washington because he faced potential arrest by the federal government.

In Charles Wright's book Appalachia there are many poems which do not have any apparent point. When speaking about the pointlessness of the book, the poem "Opus Posthumous" comes to mind. This poem does not have any meaning; it is not even a desirable poem to hear. Charles Wright wrote his poems either only for himself or a select few that might understand his off the wall creations. At first I thought that the poems were some kind of joke, but the punch lines never came. Charles Wright apparently wrote Appalachia not with the purpose of actually trying to write acceptable poetry, but was only trying to get some words onto paper so that it could be published. Appalachia is by far the worst book that I have read in years. I have seen better poetry written by teenagers. It is a waste of paper, time, and money. I only hope that contemporary poetry does not follow in the footsteps of Charles Wright, because poetry of this kind belongs in the trash.

"The Red Leaves of Night" is a poetry book written by David St. John. As contemporary poets write these days, St. John fills his poems with great feeling and passion of love and sexual desires. Sex and lust fill his poems and add great drama and emotion to them. However, he lacks any structure to his poems. There are many poems that fail to have any punctuation and are read as one giant run on sentence. My personal feelings on poetry is that it is more difficult and better to force yourself to conform your feelings into a certain structure which has a definite rhyme scheme and meter. The point of meter and a rhyme scheme is to make each word essential to the life of the poem. All the words then will count and will hold their weight in the building of the poem. With contemporary poetry these days, they just tend to ramble on and on about whatever they are feeling at the time. They lack the real power of forcing each word to really count and stand out. Most of the contemporary poems I have read could be retyped as a paragraph and no one would ever know the difference. With a real poem, you could never do this.

Anyone who mentions Cees Nooteboom, E. M. Cioraan, Wang Wei, and Gerard Manley Hopkins is sure to get my attention for I love them all. Therefore, I am biased for Charles Wright's "Appalachia".

Charles Wright has many wonderful images: "Remembered landscapes are left in me / The way a bee leaves its sting". There are also lines of religious depth: " . . . to get to God, pull both your feet back - / One foot from out of this life, one foot from the other".

Unfortunately, at the end of the book, what I recalled are wonderful lines not wonderful poems. Well worth reading, even rereading and certainly better than much of contemporary poetry.

This final book of a great series was not anything like I expected. The first part of the book doesn't even take place in Appalachia, and key characters from previous books aren't even mentioned. It is still an uplifting story, but I felt that the final book could have been much better.