Rafting Rise

by Survant, Joe

• ISBN13: 9780813025896
• ISBN10: 0813025893
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-12-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Florida

Summary

Set in the central Kentucky basins of the Rough, Green, and Ohio Rivers in 1916-17, Rafting Rise joins the storytelling virtues of fiction with the intensity of the poetic lyric to reach a wider audience, including readers of poetry, lovers of good tales, and those interested in the small events of history recreated through the lives of carefully imagined characters.

The book's central action is the rafting of logs in winter down the rivers to the lumber mills in Evansville, Indiana. Survant re-creates the whole fabric of the hardscrabble society that lives by this perilous trade. They are tough people, such as Carl Peters, stranded on a raft run aground in a freezing rain, walking in a figure eight all night to stay alive while his fellow rafter Tom Simpson, who didn't make it, ." . . lay/like frozen wood/in the bottom of our boat." Elsewhere, in love poems and poems celebrating the lush riverine landscape, Survant conveys the simple, sensuous moments that punctuate this hard life. Here is Bill Balcom at a camp meeting, eighteen and chafing for adventure on

Author Biography

Joe Survant teaches poetry writing and literature at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xiii
1916
Brother David's Warning	p. 3
Sallie Speaks of Her Calling	p. 4
The Stranding	p. 7
The Healing	p. 12
A Visit	p. 15
At the Camp Meeting	p. 16
Among the Weeds	p. 19
Bill and Robin at the Dance	p. 20
Bill with Horses on Jennings Creek	p. 22
Sallie Feels Her Heaviness	p. 23
Wild Grapes	p. 24
Haying	p. 27
The Warning	p. 29
Bindweed	p. 30
Charity	p. 31
Tongues of Light	p. 33
The Golden Circumstance	p. 34
The Iron Castle	p. 35
Ben Williams	p. 37
Timbering	p. 39
Silver Beeches	p. 41
A Brother's Dying	p. 42
The Trotline	p. 44
Robin Floyd Remembers His First Trip	p. 48
1917
The Fiery Fox	p. 53
The Soggy Woods Release Their Sorrow	p. 54
The Plumb Line	p. 55
Susan Rose's Plea	p. 60
The Feast	p. 61
Bill Waiting	p. 63
Second Sight	p. 65
Rafting Rise	p. 66
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